I love books. More than anything else. More than food. Shit, more than cleanliness. More than friends (sorry, everyone). I’d rather read about a city than visit it. I’d rather read a person’s work than converse with them. And sometimes, rather than read a book, I’d actually rather read a book about books. Whether it’s a history of a particular book (like Maureen Corrigan’s wonderful So We Read On) or a particular publisher (like Boris Kachka’s fascinating Hothouse) or a particular writer’s work (like Claudia Roth Pierpont’s brilliant Roth Unbound) or a particular group of writers (like Christopher Bram’s illuminating Eminent Outlaws), I’m all over it. In fact, it’s probably my favorite category: books on books.
And I really love collections of essays and reviews from smart, incisive literary critics. John Leonard’s Reading for My Life is a treasured volume for me, as are Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts, Hilton Als’s White Girls, James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, Christopher Hitchens’ Unacknowledged Legislation, John Updike’s Due Considerations, Joyce Carol Oates’s In Rough Country, Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind. Sorry to list so many titles, but when else do I get to talk about this stuff? Lucky for me I’m a critic, and, even luckier, that I’ve been tasked with discussing five—count ‘em, five—books about books being published this year.
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