Customer Reviews

Bookworms: Great Writers Celebrate Reading

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The perfect gift for the real reader! An anthology which includes words from your fellow readers through the centuries. This is a book you can dip into. Keep it by the bed. Read a little here, a little there. Enjoy what other reading addicts have to tell you about the place of reading in their own lives. See how reading continues to change a life, continues to provide openings, escape, a way up and a way out.

As a self-confessed bibliophile, I hoped the contributions to this book would evoke and reflect the peculiar state of mind that booklovers get during the reading experience--something on the order of Tom Raabe's "Biblioholism," or "Reading in Bed." However, I found this book to be quite a disappointment. The entries are, as a group, unremarkable and fail to engage the emotions (at least for me). Just a very few of the passages were interesting or evocative enough to flag for future reflection. I did not keep this book, unlike others on the subject of bibliomania.

The perfect gift for the real reader! An anthology which includes words from your fellow readers through the centuries. This is a book you can dip into. Keep it by the bed. Read a little here, a little there. Enjoy what other reading addicts have to tell you about the place of reading in their own lives. See how reading continues to change a life, continues to provide openings, escape, a way up and a way out.

Heres a special selection for those of you who live to
read. In Bookworms, edited by Laura Furman and Elinore
Standard, you will find a variety of essays and quotes on your
favorite subject.

The first section was for me the most interesting. Entitled The
Young Reader, it contained explanations by a variety of folks on
how they first learned to read. If you enjoy keeping a list of
the books you have read or if you have ever tried to master one
of the 100 books you absolutely have to read lists, you will
enjoy Richard Rodriguezs experiences. The more he read, the more
he discovered he needed to read next. At the library, he
remembers, I would literally trembled as I came upon whole
shelves of books I hadnt read. So I read and I read and I read.
. . .

Or perhaps you remember those first exciting moments when you
discovered a certain author, especially one who had a whole
series of books. In this case, you will identify with Hal Borland
who first came across real books while visiting a neighbor on the
prairies of Colorado. When she loaned him a copy of Coopers The
Last of the Mohicans, he had walked halfway home before he came
up for air. I had just discovered a world of horizons beyond
horizons, he remembers, a world I couldnt see even from the
top of the hay stack on a clear day. I had found something that
would shape my whole life. As I trudged on, I began to sense my
discovery, a discovery even bigger than the plains.

The next section, entitled Sorts of Readers. You will probably
concur with Joseph Epstein when he says, having too much to read
isnt a problem; having to little to read has been on occasion.
In paucity, never prolificacy, lies fear.

Do you find that men and women like different kinds of books?
Tamar Lewin speaks of boy books and girl books, Men like
anything where the point is the ideas, the landscape, or the
action; girl books are about relationships, families, and the

details of daily life. Thus the war between the sexes is really
the battle between Moby Dick and Little Women.

Other sections in this fascinating collection are Reading
Aloud, Reading Ahead (which contains a timely essay on the
impact of computers on the world of books), Queen Lear
(dealing with the way we use books to understand ourselves) and
The Privileges Pleasure Finally there is a bibliography for
those of you who want even more.

If you are a book addict, you will enjoy these essays.