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Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
Andy Miller’s Year of Reading Dangerously is more like a memoir than a book of literary criticism. I was disappointed by Miller’s emphasis on himself, but others might enjoy the details of his daily life, childhood, and youth. To his benefit, Miller avoids being boring even though his life is fairly typical. I even found myself won over in the end despite his flaws.
Flaws?
•In most of the book he comes across as a petulant complainer.
•It’s clear that his literary and musical taste was arrested in adolescence. (If you think that sounds harsh, he admits it himself.)
•He enjoys humor in books and although he is sometimes clever, he’s never very funny. I laughed only once. It was when I read, “These men of my acquaintance… loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies.”
•He hates One Hundred Years of Solitude, and compares Marquez to a trained chimp doing the same trick over and over again. He writes, “…the book is terrible.” And later, “I press on, uptight and bored”.
•He never reveals what makes his year of reading "dangerous". I thought maybe Miller would read something so moving he'd be shaken to the core, altering his life philosophy or way of life. This doesn't quite happen.
•He actually writes LOL in his book. I don’t care if this is supposed to be irony or a not-so-subtle criticism of social media, but I found it irritating and not very funny.
•Like Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture, Andy Miller laments that "blockheads" have the freedom to publish reviews online. Criticism should be the job of paid professionals who have cultivated literary taste.Read more ›
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
It would be oh-so-reasonable to expect this volume to be a virtuously inspiring summary of books we’ve all been told we should read because they’d be “good for us,” but that we haven’t quite gotten around to --- this past year, or any other year. And to be fair, there is a sprinkling of that fine sentiment in Andy Miller’s THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY.
But the emphasis in this absorbing chronicle of a British editor-writer’s personal literary journey is not so much on how long or how many; it’s on the danger, specifically the dangers of confronting and dealing with the unknown. Miller really means what his book proclaims on the cover. After all, he’s claiming in the subtitle that the 50 great books he read during one intense year just before turning 40 saved his life.
Great, you might be thinking --- another mid-life crisis tale full of whiney regret, self-recrimination and promises to be future-fulfilled. But it’s not that, either.
What Miller managed to do on his collegial pilgrimage through a book a week (and a few confessed “supplementary” titles) was let the books and their authors vicariously review him. And if that isn’t the ultimate exercise in creative humility, I don’t know what is. The moment I got the gist that this phenomenal effect was actually happening, I found myself turning pages in the addictive way some folks eat barbecue potato chips (crisps to one from Miller’s culture).
The first thing we all need to know, and that Miller finds various ways to suggest, is that there is really no definitive list of the 50 “greatest” books in all of human history (and we can’t know yet what aliens are reading and writing). He gives his own at the end, just to keep the conscientious happy.Read more ›
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
This is an interesting slice of autobiography as much as it is about the fifty great books which saved the author's life and caused him to rethink what he was doing with that same life. I found most of the rock music references incomprehensible so if you're not a music fan there are parts of the book you may want to skip.
I did find the author's comments on the books of interest and I may well read some of the books he did. I keep stumbling across George Eliot in the books I read and I am really going to have to attempt at least some of her novels - almost in self defence. Everyone who reads their way through lists of books seems to include Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' and at least one other Russian masterpiece - in this case 'Anna Karenina'. Maybe I also need to attempt one of these to see what the fuss is about.
I found the footnotes almost as interesting as the text in many places and they appear in the text of the e-book version very close to where you want to read them as well as having active links to the footnotes so the reader isn't tempted to skip them.
There are several lists of books at the end of the text for those who want to follow in the author's footsteps or to compile their own reading list and there is a bibliography and an index. If you like books about books and reading then this is one to add to add to your collection.
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You won't need any 50-page-a-day prescriptions to help you finish this book by Andy Miller (no relation).
A thoroughly enjoyable look into the author's pursuit of bettering himself through reading. Books that manage to educate you while giving you a dose of humour should be shared widely.
NOT TO BE USED: To help you lie about having read the classics. You're better than that.
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This item: The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
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