Read-a-thon is on October 12. Huzzah! To honor a day that honors reading, I've decided to post (another) Variations on a Theme all about books-about-books. I've done this topic before (click here!), but there are so many books to choose from that I am going to do it again.
How Reading Changed My Life
Anna Quindlen
In the short, entertaining book How Reading Changed My Life — part of Ballantine's Library of Contemporary Thought series — Quindlen uses her sharp observations and gentle humor to describe her inner life as a reader, a life that other confirmed bibliophiles will recognize with delight and not a few rueful smiles. Quindlen tells of her game attempts to be 'a normal child, who lived, raucous, in the world,' playing outdoors with the other children in the creek or laying pennies on the trolley track: 'But at base it was never any good. There was always a part of me, the best part of me, back at home, within some book, laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them back to life.' In describing her childhood, adolescence, and adult years, Quindlen marks the passages of time with the self-awareness she gained reading different novels, from A Wrinkle in Time to Middlemarch
Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
Michael Dirda
Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure.Yet there is another equally important, though often overlooked, reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in which they instruct, cajole, and convince remains a subject of some mystery. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer prize–winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death. Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda’s considerable knowledge, which he wears lightly. Favoring showing rather than telling, Dirda draws the reader deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to what is relevant to how we might better understand our lives.
The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
Christopher Beha
In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. The result is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that “deftly illustrates how books can save one’s life."
The Library At Night
Alberto Manguel
Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.
How To Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
Thomas C. Foster
Nicholson Baker
Other Books-About-Books Titles
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan
The City of Words - Alberto Manguel
Great Books - David Denby
How to Read a Book - Mortimer J. Adler
The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works - Charles Van Doren
On Literature - Umberto Eco
Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America - Jay Parini
So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in the Age of Abundance - Gabriel Zaid
Things That Matter: What Seven Classics Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life - Edward Mendelson
Anna Quindlen
In the short, entertaining book How Reading Changed My Life — part of Ballantine's Library of Contemporary Thought series — Quindlen uses her sharp observations and gentle humor to describe her inner life as a reader, a life that other confirmed bibliophiles will recognize with delight and not a few rueful smiles. Quindlen tells of her game attempts to be 'a normal child, who lived, raucous, in the world,' playing outdoors with the other children in the creek or laying pennies on the trolley track: 'But at base it was never any good. There was always a part of me, the best part of me, back at home, within some book, laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them back to life.' In describing her childhood, adolescence, and adult years, Quindlen marks the passages of time with the self-awareness she gained reading different novels, from A Wrinkle in Time to Middlemarch
Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure.Yet there is another equally important, though often overlooked, reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in which they instruct, cajole, and convince remains a subject of some mystery. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer prize–winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death. Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda’s considerable knowledge, which he wears lightly. Favoring showing rather than telling, Dirda draws the reader deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to what is relevant to how we might better understand our lives.
Christopher Beha
In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. The result is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that “deftly illustrates how books can save one’s life."
The Library At Night
Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.
Thomas C. Foster
Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote
to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and
today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing
societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age
throughout history. Thomas C. Foster—the sage and
scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic
codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now
examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors'
choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page,
chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative
(dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor
shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more
insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.
The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But
for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of
Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of
thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm
copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the
original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.
With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold
reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and
warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called
a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing
in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty
tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker
fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.
Other Books-About-Books Titles
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan
The City of Words - Alberto Manguel
Great Books - David Denby
How to Read a Book - Mortimer J. Adler
The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works - Charles Van Doren
On Literature - Umberto Eco
Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America - Jay Parini
So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in the Age of Abundance - Gabriel Zaid
Things That Matter: What Seven Classics Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life - Edward Mendelson
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