Book by Book

Praise for Michael Dirda and BOOK BY BOOK

“Michael Dirda is one of our best, a national treasure for those of us who care about the printed word.”

—The American Enterprise

“A slender but pleasing volume that shares some of what Dirda loves in literature and at the same time offers tips for finding a fuller life through books. . . . Dirda reigns as one of the premier book critics in the United States.”

—Marjorie Kehe,
The Christian Science Monitor

“The sheer array of literature our dedicated guide, advocate and connoisseur surveys in
Book by Book
cannot profitably be absorbed in one reading. It would be well worth the reader's time to revisit the text and rediscover its gems of observation, the author's own and those from the abundant provocative quotations Dirda also includes to amplify his themes. . . . Keep
Book by Book
on your nightstand and refer to it often. Its lessons will help you attend to the prosaic and cope with the unexpected, the difficult and the tragic. It is an indispensable literary resource.”

—Chris Byrd,
America: the National Catholic Weekly

“Dirda's interests are wildly diverse, so he writes a little about many different writers who have touched him in some way, or left ideas that have stuck with him and helped him understand his life. . . . The result is a small book that is nevertheless best read in several sittings to more easily digest the many nuggets of wisdom.”

—Dennis Lythgoe,
The Desert Morning News

“A lovingly crafted volume.”

—Library Journal

“Chapters consist of wise musings on learning, work, eros and art. The knowledgeable Dirda tells us which authors make us laugh, which make us question our daily routines.”

—Jeri Krentz,
The Charlotte Observer

“Highly cultured yet never pretentious, Dirda's survey convincingly demonstrates what a wealth of life lessons—moral, emotional and aesthetic—a good library can contain. For those who enjoy books about reading, and for all those seeking to encourage others to read, Dirda's brief yet suggestive book will inspire.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This book is compassionate, but it also means business. . . . It is clear that its author truly believes (as I do) that books have all the answers, especially when the answer is that there is no answer except that this is life here upon earth.”

—Katherine Powers,
The Boston Globe

BOOK BY BOOK

ALSO BY MICHAEL DIRDA

Bound to Please: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books
An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader's Life
Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

N
OTES ON
R
EADING AND
L
IFE

M
ICHAEL
D
IRDA

Holt Paperbacks
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
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New York, New York 10010
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A Holt Paperback® and
® are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright © 2005 by Michael Dirda
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

“Book I” by William Carlos Williams, from
Patterson
, copyright © 1946 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Sappho” (excerpt) by Guy Davenport from 7
Greeks
, copyright © 1995 by Guy Davenport. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dirda, Michael.

Book by book : notes on reading and life / Michael Dirda.—1st ed.
    p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8338-5
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8338-3

1. Books and reading. 2. Dirda, Michael—Books and reading. 3. Best books. 4. Reading—Social aspects. 5. Commonplace-books. I. Title.
Z1003.D575 2006
028.9—dc22                                                                  2005055451

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2007

Illustrations © Elvis Swift

Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

To Oberlin College

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

— MICHEL FOUCAULT

PREFACE:
At Home in the World

ONE:
Life Lines

TWO:
The Pleasures of Learning

THREE:
Work and Leisure

FOUR:
The Books of Love

FIVE:
Bringing It All Back Home

SIX:
Living in the World

SEVEN:
Sights and Sounds

EIGHT:
The Interior Library

NINE:
Matters of the Spirit

TEN:
Last Things

A Selective and Idiosyncratic Who's Who

Acknowledgments

Live-and-let-live over stand-or-die, high spirits over low,... love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.

— MARVIN MUDRICK

Over the past fifty years I've spent a lot of time—some might say an inordinate amount of time—in the company of books. Storytelling has always enchanted me, and early on I found myself reading just about anything that came my way, from Green Lantern comics to the great classics of world literature. My memoir,
An Open Book
, recounts a young life unexpectedly shaped by this omnivorous and indiscriminate reading. After childhood, though, I ceased being a purely “amateur” reader, only to become a professional one, first as a graduate student in
comparative literature, and since 1978 as a professional reviewer and columnist for the
Washington Post Book World.

During these past three decades the
Post
has kindly allowed me to write about nearly any sort of book that caught my fancy, and my fancy can be quite promiscuous—ancient classics one week, science fiction and fantasy the next. Despite all these hours of turning pages, I don't view myself as a bookworm, one of those bald-pated Daumier scarecrows peering through bottle-top spectacles at some tattered, leather-bound volume. There's more to life than reading. I've also fallen in love and married, spent Saturdays ferrying noisy offspring to soccer games, mowed grass, folded laundry, and suffered my share of what Shakespeare called “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

A normal enough life, then. Yet even as a kid back in working-class Lorain, Ohio, I decided that what I wanted most of all was— how shall I put this?—to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present.

In some ways, that ambition must sound odd, even slightly romantic. But let me explain. About the age of twelve or thirteen, I grew enamored of the story of the Count of Monte Cristo. Suave, cosmopolitan, wealthy, charismatic, the count actually starts life as a naive young sailor named Edmond Dantès, betrayed by those he trusted and imprisoned on the Château d'If for a crime he never committed. At first he despairs. But one day he hears a quiet scraping noise coming from inside his cell wall—tunneling—and in due course meets the learned Abbé Faria, who eventually teaches him everything an accomplished man of the world should
know. The young sailor studies, practices, learns, remembers. And so when, after many years, he is finally able to escape and seek a reckoning with those who wronged him, Edmond Dantès has transformed himself into the urbane and accomplished Count of Monte Cristo.

Alexandre Dumas's novel remains a great parable about the power of learning and education and calls to mind one of our most fundamental American convictions: that any of us may, through hard work, fashion a new and better life for himself. As Henry David Thoreau long ago observed, “If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

In childhood and early youth most of us naturally read for escape, pleasure, and inspiration; as young adults we use our school texts to learn a profession or trade; and then as full-fledged grown-ups we add yet another, perhaps deeper purpose to our reading: We turn to books in the hope of better understanding our selves and better engaging with the meaning of our experiences. Let me say, right off, that I believe a work of art is primarily concerned with the creation of beauty, whether through words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movement. But it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies without also growing convinced that they gradually enlarge our minds, refine our spirits, make us more sensitive and understanding. In this way, the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are instruments of self-exploration.