Recently I tried my hand at book reviewing. It was not a success.
I'm not a critic. I lack the coordinates to map the latest example of literary fiction, and I find myself incapable of making pithy remarks about a book's value to the literary world.
I am a reader––a lifelong, avid, daily reader––and so have decided to write about my relationship to books, often as specific books, but also as things in themselves––the book in hand and on the shelf––and (very) occasionally about books made into movies and authors into stars.
Before we go any further, I should make clear I'm quite aware that this idea is in no way original. Lots of people have written about being a reader. Anne Fadiman delighted me in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (FSG 2000), and I go back to her essays when thinking and writing about books, especially as physical objects.
But it was Nick Hornby's essays in his column in The Believer, later collected in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (Penguin, 2007), that really got me thinking and writing about my life as a reader. He's right: books can be boring, and sometimes it's too much bother to finish one, all the more so when once again reading something simply because it's an Important Book. Books can be distressing, tedious, difficult, life-changing, a joy, a pleasure, a pastime, a stopgap, or sometime just a bit better than staring at other passengers on the train.
In any case, others have been down this road before, laying out their lives as readers, and usually they are people you'd have good reason to suspect are interesting readers. Moreover, they've done it more poetically or more outrageously than is likely here. In fact, you should probably stop here and go read Hornby or Fadiman or someone else. If you feel you must continue (Hi, Mom!), read on.
