Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Corrigan, the book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air and mystery columnist for the Washington Post, makes her own book debut with an often longwinded and tedious account of how books have shaped her life. It's clear from every page that Corrigan is obsessed with reading books. Her compulsion is a bit far reaching, however: she offers books as the reason why she delayed getting married and why she adopted her daughter in China. She intersperses lengthy descriptions and analysis of her favorite books, like Jane Eyre, Lucky Jim and Karen (Marie Killilea's memoir of her daughter) with stories from her own life. At times, the book reads like a feminist diatribe against the injustices female authors (and graduate students) have endured and the stereotypical portrayal of female characters. In its favor, the book allows readers to reexperience some perennial favorites, such as Pride and Prejudice and The Maltese Falcon. Corrigan does speak to the ability of books to provide escape and solace, and for the creation of characters we can relate to, but these few gems are buried deep in text so thick and analytical that the reader is often left gasping for air.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reading Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading was for me like the uncanny experience of looking into a mirror and seeing someone else's face. Like Maureen Corrigan, I too have reviewed countless books. Like her, I have an adopted child from another country. Perhaps most powerfully, both she and I are outspoken fans of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, which Corrigan calls "Brontë's greatest novel." Jane Eyre has stolen the limelight of history, but Lucy Snowe is more complex and empathetic. Corrigan cites the truly agonizing scene in the novel where the heroine, Lucy, alone in Brussels, is overcome by crippling depression. She wanders about the city in the dark, "weak and shaking" with the "insufferable thought of being no more loved, no more owned." There is no more powerful portrait of utter loneliness in our literature, and Corrigan exactly captures its power when she says she can't reread it often because "it scares me too much."

For those who love books, the temptation to write a book about books is almost irresistible, and there is no doubt about Corrigan's passion. For 16 years she has been book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air" (four minutes per book, she tells us: "keep it short") as well as a mystery columnist for this newspaper. Her approach here is to mix autobiography and books, interweaving scenes from her own life with the books that have accompanied her every step of the way.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading is full of discoveries and lists -- readers love lists. Under the heading "Fiction and Nonfiction That Make a Reader Believe in Possibility," she lists "Almost anything by M.F.K. Fisher," as well as Laurie Colwin's collected novels, short stories and essays, and the arcane News From Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, by William Morris. The latter, she candidly admits, is perhaps a rather special taste.

Corrigan is particularly irresistible when writing about mysteries, and she has done a great deal to get the genre the credit it deserves. "After twenty years of reading and studying detective fiction," she writes, "I feel like I've only begun to probe the mysteries of the genre itself and how it has investigated American life over the past century." However, she feels these novels "are still regarded as the junkyard dogs of literature." I think she's wrong about that and is too modest about her own contribution to the growth and popularity of the mystery novel. By the time I finished her book, I wanted to run out and buy Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and was asking everyone I knew if they had read it -- many already had.

Corrigan's enthusiasm for the novels of Susan Isaacs reflects her winning openness to popular fiction. She calls Isaacs "Jane Austen with a schmear" and judges her "one of our great underappreciated contemporary writers." I am delighted to imagine all the listeners of "Fresh Air" enjoying Isaacs's Shining Through, one of Corrigan's favorites, starring a legal secretary from Queens who finds herself in Nazi Germany as an agent for the OSS. All the same, I wish Corrigan could avoid undercutting her own fine taste by adding that Isaacs "works in the low-rent genres of mystery and suspense." Months on the bestseller lists and headline-grabbing advances for writers such as Robert B. Parker, Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton are surely not "low rent"! She singles out Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, as "the funniest novel in the English language." And among the 14 novels she selects for her "Books I Never Get Tired of Rereading" list are: Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym; The Book of Daniel, by E.L. Doctorow; Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; and The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Charles Dickens is the only writer who gets multiple mentions on this roll of honor, for David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations.

Unfortunately, the book runs into trouble when the relatively tedious autobiographical chapters interrupt the flow of the passionate and seductive choices for her personal bookshelf. For the powerful endorsements of some of my all-time favorite pieces of fiction, especially the under-appreciated Villette, I am prepared to forgive Corrigan some slow-moving sections when she takes us through her rediscovery of the assigned reading of both her childhood and her student days. She devotes more than 40 pages to the experience of rereading books she read in the 1960s at her Catholic school in Sunnyside, Queens. On the curriculum for all the girls at St. Raphael's was a series of novels featuring a virtuous Catholic girl nicknamed Beany. Corrigan now feels this fictional series of "secular-saint stories" was used by the nuns to inculcate the precept that "good women simply serve and submit."

Despite devoting a lot of space to her Irish Catholic roots, Corrigan is clearly ambivalent about her cultural heritage. As a result she fails to make a convincing connection between her mandatory childhood reading and her adult love of the written word and ends up making the books of her youth sound dull.

The less successful retrospective parts of this book are a pity because Corrigan has some truly wonderful insights. I wish she'd said more about books she loves and less about Catholic school and her disenchantment with graduate education, but anyone who loves Charlotte Brontë, Dorothy Sayers and the poems of Stevie Smith is for me "a kindred spirit" (as Little Women's Jo March would say). Book lovers will be busy checking her lists, searching for new "leave me alone" titles. As Corrigan tells us, "Unforgettable books take us to places we didn't even suspect existed, places we may not even have wanted to go." And she's right.

Reviewed by Brigitte Weeks
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375709037
• ISBN-13: 978-0375709036
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132,021 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly enjoyable., June 28, 2006

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (Hardcover)

Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (Random House, 2005)

One of the best things about this book-- a no-brainer, really-- is that when morons try to strike up conversations with you in public while you're reading (were these people born in a barn, really?) by asking you what it is you are reading, all you have to do is show them the title. If you're lucky, they'll take the hint. Conversation ended, and you can get back to Maureen Corrigan's interesting dual meditation on books and life. (If the person persists, and asks the next obvious question-- "What's it about?"-- unload on that person with both barrels. They're obviously not going to pick up on subtlety.) Thus, keeping a copy of it close by is pretty much a necessity for any dedicated reader.

As to the book's content, it should be close to the heart of that same dedicated reader; it's half about books and half about life-- specifically, Maureen Corrigan's life. She starts off with the feminine version of the extreme-adventure tale (with women, the extreme-adventure tale isn't about climbing mountains or disappearing in the perfect storm, but about such mundane, but still horrific, tests as abuse, childbirth, the possibility of spinsterhood in the Brontes and Austens of the literary landscape). Everything stems from here; Corrigan's other chapters cover hardboiled detective fiction and Catholic martyr tales, variations on the extreme-adventure theme, all tied to Corrigan's life. Not that she (usually) compares herself to the heroines of these tales, but it's still pretty easy to trace the parallels. It also helps, for the dedicated reader, the Corrigan has pretty much the dream job-- she does reviews and interviews for NPR's premiere arts show, Fresh Air. Yes, there's a good deal to identify with.

Most of the criticisms of the book I've heard deal with the idea that the autobiographical bits don't hold up as well as the bits where she's talking about books. I didn't find that to be the case; I thought the whole book was rather engaging. Corrigan has led an interesting life; she doesn't take on the weepier-than-thou attitude of the run-of-the-mill memoir, instead looking at her life in the same way she's discussing the novels under consideration. It may be a small difference in the general scheme of things, but it's a valuable one, in my opinion.

A good, solid book. Worth your time. *** ½

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Books & Life, September 23, 2005

By	Josh K. (Arlington, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (Hardcover)

If you love books, if you love to think about books, then "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading" should be at the top of that pile next to your bed. Corrigan's personal memoir/literary exploration is smart, interesting, opinionated, extremely well-written, frequently stimulating and thought-provoking, and always sharply - yet self-deprecatingly - funny. I found this rare combination of attributes impossible to resist.

Here are two specific examples of why I loved - rather than just "liked" or "appreciated" - "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading." Example No. 1: This book about the author's lifelong love of, and near obsession with, reading begins with the following epigraph, a quote from the contractor fixing the leaking, book-filled basement in Corrigan's home: "Bet you didn't learn anything about foundations when you were in graduate school for English." Example No. 2: describing the difference between herself and the people she knows who have no deeply felt appreciation for books (or the stacks of them that made her graduate school apartment look like the warehouse in the final scene of "Citizen Kane"), Corrigan writes: "They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls."

The book moves seamlessly back and forth from the seminal episodes and people in Corrigan's life, to the most meaningful of the thousands (millions?) of books she has read. In both realms, Corrigan meanders effortlessly from the deeply significant (the adoption of her daughter from China) and the high-brow (the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontes), to the ridiculous (grad school in-fighting) and the (seemingly) low-brow (Nancy Drew and Dashiell Hammett). Like Stephen Jay Gould illuminating the beauty and complexities of evolution, Corrigan can explicate the deeper significance of literary masterpieces without talking down to her audience, and relate these timeless themes to the comedy and tragedy and absurdity of daily life.

Perhaps the best way to sum up how I felt about "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading" is to say that it left me wanting to spend a week or two on some beach with Corrigan and a group of friends, talking about life and books, books and life.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing book!, September 6, 2005

By	E (Reader in DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (Hardcover)

From the first line, in which she confesses that she often prefers reading a book to spending time in even the best company, Maureen Corrigan had me hooked with this hilarious, honest, down-to-earth memoir of her life as a reader.

Corrigan is a genius at comically puncturing the pieties we all take for granted. When she and her husband, Rich, adopt their daughter from China, the story is especially moving because she keeps directing us to its more absurd aspects (the couple sit through bad adoption videos and stay in a Chinese hotel that also houses a bordello before finally bringing home their baby daughter). In telling the story of adopting Molly, Corrigan effortlessly evokes many different books from Ruth Reichl's sad adoption saga in Comfort Me with Apples to Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Full of literary recommendations, snappy lines, and clever insights, Leave Me Alone I'm Reading is the best and funniest book I've read in a long time.