Customer Reviews

Bound to Please

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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Here is a book, at long last, that does not derive its energy from sniping at authors. Rather, Dirda has read everything (EVERYTHING) and will tell you which humor, sci fi, mystery, romance, intellectual history, european bildugsroman, thrillers, well, I could go on for a while -- which ones are worth reading. His descriptions are exact, his enthusiasm enlivening, and as a reader of his for several years, I can attest that his recommendations are spot on. Here is a book to live with -- it is that good. My only criticism is that it will leave you with an ever lengthening shelf of books you are eager to read!

Mr. Dirda adopts a wonderful tone as he shares with his readers his fine appreciations of the books included in this compilation. He is never pedantic or narrow or arrogant, but he is fully aware of the nuances of the many works he discusses. Each essay is short and crisp. What a pleasure it has been to read this book. This is a fine book for booklovers.

As a reader of Dirda's previous books, I came to this one as a fan. I was not disappointed. Dirda is a literary enthusiast and it is this quality that he so infectiously imparts to the reader. This collection can most usefully serve as an introduction to writers and books that remained "off your radar" until reading Dirda's loving appreciation. Though no great stylist himself, it is the quality he most admires in other writers and his journalistic essays show you why. He is also no literary snob and proudly announces his love for genre writing like science-fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror alongside the "greats" (and not so great).

Finally, he is not a great critic like James Wood and his insights are rarely profound, but this collection isn't analytic criticism but rather descriptive. A huge compendium, you'll find yourself nonetheless reading it cover-to-cover. A literary delight.

The love of books, the search to know the world through books, the real hunger for books, the appreciation of books, the understanding that books can be the means by which we enhance our own life and experience- all of these are apparent in the work of Michael Dirda. His reviews by and large augment the interest we have in the work. They make us want to know the books better and read them more. His taste is wideranging, but it includes first and above all the truly greatest literature of mankind.
It is possible not only to derive great enjoyment from these reviews but also to learn a great deal about the world's literature from them.

I used to read Dirda's reviews in the Washington Post back when I lived in Maryland, before I moved to the Michigan hinterlands where, it seems, very few people read at all. Not long after I arrived here in the north country I read Dirda's memoir of growing up in Ohio (An Open Book), a book which explains plainly and often humorously why he has this love affair with books - all books, both great and small. I enjoyed Mike's memoir so much that I moved on to these collected reviews. I've had Bound to Please for close to a year now and I'm still making my way through it. Reading these erudite reviews of books, many of which I have never read and perhaps never will, is a kind of education in itself. It is a humbling experience to see how Dirda absorbs, understands and then explains books about the Bible, Ovid, Rilke, Herodotus, Trollope, Flaubert, Proust, Shaw, Housman, etc. - the list seems endless. And he progresses from the classics of western civilization on to more contemporary writers like Updike, DeLillo, Gaddis, Gass, Colette, Amis, Byatt, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs. Reading Dirda on writing and writers is like listening to a favorite lecturer, and I'm over forty years past my last college classroom. He almost makes me want to go back and start over. But perhaps I'll just use these essays as a starting point and try to make time to go back and either re-read or read for the first time all those important writers I've already enjoyed or have only heard of. I keep this book handy to take with me to the bathroom. It's always nice to learn something while taking care of baser bodily business. Thank you for sharing your erudition and opinions, Mr. Dirda. - Tim Bazzett, author of Pinhead: A Love Story

Bound to Please is a wonderful book full of useful information for book lovers. Michael Dirda, an expert book reviewer, recommends such a wide variety of books to read that you can peruse it over and over again and still discover something new to read or something to recommend to a friend.

Bound to read, is easy to read and understand and may send you to your nearest bookstore, or online to Amazon to shop for books that you suddenly need to have, or for some books, your local used bookstore may need a visit. Often the books are given the time of year to read, or the amount of time you may need to read the book in the review.

The list of books and authors is huge, from old classics to newer modern authors - with each section broken into chapters with several reviews in each, such as Old Masters and Serious Entertainers. This is a meaty book full of good stuff! I highly recommend for any book lover or to anyone who could use some insight on picking some good books to read.

This book is outstanding! It is a great literary education in one volume.

I can't be as enthusiastic as some others have been here because one thing I see in most of these collected newspaper reviews is the lost potential: they should be longer and more developed.

But I can agree that Dirda has a gift for staying positive without going completely the way of Thumper's mother, and he is definitely widely read (though who can claim to have read everything--I think we'll all die having read very very far from everything we might have profited from).

I am fond of Dirda for a number of reasons. First, he is a middlebrow in an age which largely disdains efforts at public education. Second, he is from a working-class background and is neither afraid to talk about it or using it as a touchstone in everything he writes. Third, he has championed genre writing-the science fiction of Philip Dick, for instance-as serious reading (rather than as fun slumming or mere cultural artifact).

I suppose I can see a lot of myself in Dirda, and I see a lot of what I aspire to in what he has already accomplished. He's a Northern, working-class kid, a scholarship boy in the Hoggartian sense, and a man who has developed a level of comfort with both the old traditions of "high culture" and a way of communicating that comfort to a relatively broad audience through the newspaper and the Internet. And also through books.

Dirda's second collection of essays and reviews has recently come out. For fans of his first collection, Readings, this second collection may come as a bit of a disappointment. Readings was a slim volume of pieces cherry-picked from Dirda's journalism to best reflect that which was most characteristically Dirdian. there was very little of the sort of workaday reviewing that necessarily makes up most of his work for the Post. Bound to Please is a different matter. It is a much bigger book than Readings, and it can print only that which came after or was passed over for the earlier book.

So, the reader oughtn't come to Bound to Please with the expectation of the intimate experience we got in Readings. But, as a collection of reiews, this isn't bad. Dirda always writes clearly, and there's usually some insight or aside that makes each short review more than worthwhile.

This is an excellent book for idle perusing. But one really longs for Dirda to be given a better platform than the Post's Bookworld pages. Many of these essays seem like they were quite a bit longer in an earlier draft. and most of those can use the extra legth.

I'd be interested to see Dirda taking up a post like Christopher Hitchens's gig at the Atlantic. In fact, as Hitchens has become more and more self-indulgent and positive pontifical in his Atlantic criticism, it owuld seem to me to be trading up at this point to replace Hitchens with Dirda. Dirda's erudition is rather more pedestrian that Hitchens's maybe, but Hitchens's bailiwick is seeming very narrow lately-how much more are we expected to read about the death throws of the British Empire and the literature that coincided with it? At this point in history, not only is the British Empire dead, but the death of the British empire is dead.

And I think we ought not be shy of declaring the death of a certain strain the post-imperialist British writing, either. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens-the spawn of Nabokov and Naipul-are over. (They all might want to deny the Naipaul legacy, but it's become pretty apparent of late.)

Martin Amis once wrote that "The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself . . ." I'm not sure he's right about "the" novelist, but it certainly seems to me that he's right about himself and his close friends Hitchens and Rushdie. They write for well-hheled, Oxbridge educated males. And those who desperately want to attain to that consdition.

Once, perhaps, I may have been someone who wanted to gain access to this metropolitan elite, but anymore I find them to be privileged dinosaurs, living out an anachronistic afterlife courtesy of Anglophone sentimentality. These are all talented men, no doubt, but to me it seems they are attempting to pass elaborate erudition and natural superiority when these things have simply lost their currency. They may soldier on in the same manner in a sort of Sinatra-esque endless farewell tour (Hitchens definitely looks to be the Dean Martin type), or they may well transform themselves into something more meaningful. But time has come that we put these folks aside as our literary ideals.

Appropriately enough, Dirda would not represent an absolute break from the Nabakov line. He, too, is a great admirer of the Swiss master, and he has been generally respectful to the post-imperialists, as well. But his predilections are for the middle brow and his admiration of the really quite different Pynchon-esque American stream modern fiction.

I cannot imagine any reader and book lover who will not find books here to add to his wish list. Obviously there are many established or aspiring classics, but Dirda shows them in a new light and whets the appetite to read or re-read Pepys or Pynchon, Byatt or Dostoevsky. In addition there are gems like the review of Frayling's book on Sergio Leone, Gilmour's Biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa or an inviting Science Fiction Reading List. Enjoy the appetizer in Dirda's book but then go for the books themselves!