Reading Life

In Reading Life, virtuoso critic and essayist Sven Birkerts examines what it means to return to resonant works of fiction—the books one thinks of "covetously, as private properties," the "personal signposts" of one's inner life. For Birkerts, these include The Catcher in the Rye, Humboldt's Gift, To the Lighthouse, and Lolita. In twelve far-reaching and intimate essays, Birkerts reflects upon his first readings and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, the murmuring transistors of selfhood.

Praise

"Reading about reading is a mirroring of reality. Writing a book review about a fellow critic's experience of reading can feel oddly self-referential. But if you are what you read, this reviewer feels larger in her literary sympathies and understanding after consuming Reading Life."—Jeffrey Ann Goudie, The Kansas City Star

"Rereading favorite novels is the theme underpinning the latest book by an eminent American critic, who here presents a series of erudite but certainly not passionless discussions about the novels he is most prone to return to. His wide-ranging list includes J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Knut Hamsun's Pan, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Alice Munro's Beggar Maid . . .  Serious fiction readers will obtain valuable guidance in articulating their own private literary passions."—Booklist


Table of Contents

The Reading Life
Children's Crusade—J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Love's Wound, Love's Salve—Knut Hamsun's Pan
"I Don't Believe That"—D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love
Romancing the Self—Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
The Mad Energies of Art—Saul Bellow's Humbold't Gift
The Murderer's Fancy Prose Style—Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
The Possibility of the Search—Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
The Saddest Story, Indeed—Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
"Live All You Can"—Henry James's The Ambassadors
Into the Blue Paint—Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
The Tether of Origins—Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

About the Author(s)

Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts is the author of Readings, The Gutenberg Elegies, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. He teaches at Harvard University and at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is the editor of Agni. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

photo: Lise Haines