Customer Reviews

An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Our book group was fortunate enough to have Michael Dirda attend our discussion of this memoir. He is delightful, witty and steeped in the pleasures of reading, just as his book is. It's the story of an insecure, highly intelligent boy from a family of limited means who engages the world through literature. He is guided by several inspiring teachers, but mostly is self-taught as to what makes good reading and the lessons in life to be gleaned from books. While his keen intelligence sets him apart from his family in many respects, he also lives an ordinary and in some respects idyllic boyhood in Ohio.

As Michael Dirda said of one of the books he recently reviewed for the Washington Post, "you really should read this book."

I have read most of Michael's (and, yes, I feel as though I know him well enough after reading this book to call him by his first name) books and always find them both highly entertaining and informative. I am fascinated by all things literary--including other people that are. On the surface, this is the story of one man's journey through life who befriended literature at an early age as, perhaps, a means of dealing with the usual insecurities. Reading became an obsession and he was able to parlay this love (with the help of a "little" talent and intelligence) into a Pulitzer Prize winning career. I wish he would have been able to spend more time talking about individual books and authors within the context of his own interests and life experience; however, he pointed out at the beginning he would not be using this particular venue for such.

I found his memoirs delightfully readable.

Michael Dirda is the chief book reviewer at the Washington Post. This book is his autobiographica literaria, his attempt to recount the books he was exposed to growing up and how they shaped him.

I would only recommend the second half, starting just after the young Michael comes home from trying to run away. The first half isn't so great.

Though I personally enjoyed it, I don't think it was very well written. After a few pages, it seems like he's just mentioning title after title without going into much detail at all about any of them, or precisely how they helped to mold his mind. "In the afternoons I would thrill to the adventures of John Carter of Mars. I also loved Robinson Crusoe." That sort of thing.

Dirda seems to have no trouble mentioning the books that he's read or that affected him, but as for explaining how they shaped his personality, he doesn't do that very well here. Maybe in one of his other books. True, he does that for a few books when discussing his Oberlin application, but that's the exception. Now that I think about it, this book doesn't give you much of an idea about the author's personality at all, beyond just that he's from a working-class family and has pretty much always liked reading books.

There's really no overarching theme, and Dirda changes topics so frequently that one must pay close attention: nearly every paragraph is about something else. Rarely do you see a sequence of several paragraphs about the same theme or situation. I think Dirda would have done better to present this as a disjointed series of vignettes, since that's pretty much what it is. Running all these disparate paragraphs together as if he were telling a coherent narrative gets trying.

If you love books, you'll often find a smile of recognition on your face while going through this; for me, it lacks the magic of character or circumstances to warrant a re-read.

Lastly, I would have to say this book humbled me, so maybe I'm angry at it. I thought I was well read, but this guy. Jesus H.!

A very good book, writen in a way to make you want to continue reading it and feel relaxing.