When I Was a Child I Read Books

"The greatest pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its prose. Ms. Robinson channels the cadences of Emerson and Whitman and says that she owes the stately shape of her sentences to her school-days reading of Cicero. ‘I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for,' she writes, ‘and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail to find these words.' On the evidence of language itself, she marvels at the capacity of human perception. She describes the wonder expressed by a group of French students about the number of English words that describe light—glimmer, glitter, glisten, glean, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine—which testify to a human need for distinctions beyond the bare essentials. Words like ‘grace,' ‘soul' and ‘miracle,' she suggests, speak to registers of experience that even the most secular among us are reluctant to relinquish. When I Was a Child I Read Books may seem like a book addressed to Christians—some of the essays have the whiff of the pulpit—but Ms. Robinson's church is exceptionally broad. Her essays are psalms to an indivisible America."—Thomas Meaney, The Wall Street Journal

"In a climate increasingly averse to compassion and unappreciative of curiosity, Robinson has published When I Was a Child I Read Books, a glimmering, provocative collection of essays, each a rhetorically brilliant, deeply felt exploration of education, culture, and politics . . . When I Was a Child is a brutally, beautifully intelligent jeremiad on the cynical state of American culture and politics, but Robinson is rare today in that she uses the language of faith to advance the most cultivated humanistic values all in an attempt to defend what she sees as an imperiled American greatness . . . When I Was a Child strives to burn off the blather and tame the wolfishness that currently bedevils our society."—Michael Washburn, Boston Globe

"These rich, uncompromising essays are not for everyone but—to make a Robinson-like distinction of my own—their rewards should be for anyone, of any faith, who cares to dive deeply into a distant world."—Emily Stokes, Financial Times

"It is difficult not to quote Ms. Robinson at length, so finely calibrated are her sentences. Here, it's a tonic to see a rhetoric of such righteous anger turned, for once, against those who believe it is virtuous to attempt to deprive their fellow citizens of aid and succor . . . these essays represent what Robinson calls ‘an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins.' This is what education is for, and this book is a tool for those who would be archaeologists of their own thinking. Even when one disagrees with her, Ms. Robinson is always worth reading because she is as gifted a stylist as the English language has at present. Sentence after sentence demands to be re-read for the pleasure the mind takes in well-made things . . . It's time to recognize that Ms. Robinson is also a thinker of the first order, one of the finest we have ever had."—Michael Robbins, The New York Observer

"The indomitable Marilynne Robinson radiates genius in her collection of essays."—Vanity Fair

"[When I Was a Child I Read Books] is the equivalent of an uncommon library ticket, an admission to the subjects that most obsess her: the frail human enterprise, faith and its absence, mysteries that elude language. . . This book is scholarly close work, as painstaking as a Victorian sampler but more subtle. She is determined never to undervalue or oversimplify. There is a sense that to be meditative is a necessary part of being alive. She is especially clear on the absurdity of seeing religion and science as adversarial . . . Robinson is adept at studying the small print and reading between the lines but she never forgets to look up at the stars."—Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

"Robinson's country is at a political and moral crossroads, so she wants to remind her readers of its history, what it stood for and how far away it has moved from its founding principles . . . Her rhetoric is of the gentle, thoughtful kind that nevertheless hides a rapier, which she unleashes just when she needs it. Mary Wollstonecraft was once insultingly called a ‘hyena in petticoats' by a man who felt threatened by her intellect. Like Wollstonecraft, Robinson's intellect, too, is threatening. And if it can threaten us into action, is all the greater for that."—Lesley McDowell, The Independent

"At her best she's a wise, droll and incisive essayist. These pieces concern faith, education, family, writing and reading, and . . . they're enlightening and a pleasure to read . . . Some of the most effective and immediate essays in the collection deal with Robinson's decision to become a writer and how she approaches her craft . . . These pages will be of great interest to her many devoted readers and would-be novelists alike."—Kevin Canfield, The Kansas City Star


"It's never been easy to categorize Marilynne Robinson, whose new collection of essays . . . is no exception. Each of the pieces gathered here practices what Robinson preaches, combating the lazy habit of using ‘a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe' . . . she works to free her readers from the ‘tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind,' in which we ‘try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell' . . . When we are alone, Robinson suggests, we're best positioned for a ‘meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one's eye'—including other people, who we're otherwise apt to misread. As this collection makes clear, Robinson's own eyes read widely—and well."—Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Robinson's penchant for complex sentences and lofty subjects mirrors the thoughtfulness of what she wants to say. And while she may be an old-fashioned stylist, she is also a progressive thinker who yokes rigorous scholarship with profound attention to her subjects . . . Her new essay collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, may best be served with a straight-back chair and a mug of piping-hot black coffee. But I say, strap yourself in. Robinson's words, girded by a scholar's seat and a stimulant, will sharpen you up . . . Having read these essays, I have a better understanding of the sort of mind that could create Gilead, a novel of quiet grace, and Housekeeping, a book so beautiful and other-worldly that at times it threatens to float away altogether."—Maggie Galehouse, The Houston Chronicle

"The latest turn in Robinson's thinking is toward politics, specifically her strong intuition of political crisis in America. She's talked politics before, but it's never been quite this intense or urgent . . . Besides the essays' tone, which is consistently heartfelt, moving from grave (‘We do not deal with one another as soul to soul.') to joyful (‘I love the writers of my thousand books.'), her political concerns give the book a kind of informal unity . . . She includes almost zero references to TV, movies, Facebook, celebs, or anything to do with pop culture. Her lonesome distance from the mainstream is eccentric, but it's also what gives her essays their strange power to diagnose America's discontents. It's a perspective that's simultaneously alienated and engaged, public and personal . . . if any of her thought somehow seeped out into America I think we'd be much better off for it."—Alex Engebretson, The Millions




"In an age when such American politicians as Michele Bachman display an astounding ignorance of the history of her own country . . . Robinson's essay collection [is] a valuable contribution to public discourse in the United States."—Philip Marchand, The National Post

"Robinson offers her essays in the face of this confusion, as ‘night thoughts of a baffled humanist' . . . She aims to defend both religion and humanism from their not-quite-so cultured despisers, many of whom may be found self-identifying as ‘religious' or as ‘humanists.' . . . Robinson takes aim . . . at those who would diminish the human person . . . Whatever else these new essays are—and they are many wonderful and interesting things—they are Robinson's determination not to diminish mystery, not to make foolishness of the world or the human person by forcing theories to limit our wonder at God, the human brain and mind, the cosmos. The essays are tonic for our adoration-starved religious and scientific cultures, bracing in their critique and hope-giving in the alternative way of seeing that they open up for us."—Wesley Hill, Books & Culture

"This is a rare writer about America and one it seems to me we need. Desperately. Whether writing about Jefferson or Johann Friederich Oberlin or ‘the dark gorgeousness' of the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson is a self-described ‘humanist' who says ‘the presence of human consciousness is a radical qualitative change in the natural order' . . . Her imagination of other lives, in these essays, defines an imperiled democracy to which, she says, we need to remain loyal . . . One of the year's stealthy great books."—Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News

"A provocative—and deceptive—plainness is a constant feature of Robinson's work, which asks us to accept the hidden richness of the mundane . . . [When I Was a Child I Read Books is] the fascinating expression of a rooted and contrary mind."—John Broening, The Denver Post

"[Robinson] questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness . . . Be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and to think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose."—Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle

"Most striking of all is Robinson's mental work ethic. She seems to be incapable of a lazy conclusion . . . Robinson's great strengths [are] independence and eccentricity . . . Robinson, though some of her views are well known, is never predictable, for her discipline is to look at every question as though she were considering it for the first time. It is impossible not to be fortified and enlarged by a few hundred pages in her company."—Stefan Beck, The Barnes and Noble Review
"When I Was a Child, by far Robinson's most political work to date, turns her old questions to the problems now directly confronting us. The book is a defense of what she considers the grand traditions of American democracy—generosity, hope, and a radical openness to new experience—waged against a society that seems to believe itself in irreversible decline . . . Robinson's great virtue as an essayist is her ability to combine a deep knowledge of this country's literary, intellectual, and religious canon with a demotic, impassioned tone that is American in the highest sense . . . Robinson is a representative of the grand tradition of liberal Protestantism, still carrying the flame for the likes of Jonathan Edwards and Paul Tillich . . . For those who prefer their liberal American dream in the language of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, Robinson has, for the past three decades, been the standard-bearer."—Charles Petersen, Bookforum
"The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist returns with a collection of essays that are variously literary, political and religious . . . Robinson is a splendid writer, no question—erudite, often wise and slyly humorous . . . Articulate and learned descriptions and defenses of the author's Christian faith."—Kirkus Reviews

"There is more food for thought in one of Robinson's well-turned paragraphs than in entire books . . . Robinson is a consummate and clarion essayist. In her third and most resounding collection, she addresses our toxic culture of diminishment, arguing that as our view of society shrinks, public discourse coarsens, corruption spreads, education is undermined, science denigrated, spirituality and loving kindness are siphoned from religion, and democracy itself is imperiled . . . Intellectually sophisticated, beautifully reasoned with gravitas and grace, Robinson's call to reclaim humaneness beams like the sun breaking through smothering clouds . . . The great success of Robinson's novels will ensure interest in her brilliant reflections on the most urgent questions of our lives."—Booklist (starred review)
"Robinson weighs in with a series of tightly developed essays, some personal but mostly more general, on the Big Themes: social fragmentation in modern America, human frailty, faith. Her project is a hard-edged liberalism, sustained by a Calvinist ethic of generosity . . . In these times of the ever-ascending religious right, in the aftermath of what she sees as the ideologically secularist-driven cold war, Robinson bravely explores the corrosive potion of ‘Christian anti-Judaism' and what it really ought to mean to be ‘a Christian nation.'"—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)