Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books - Hardcover

Lesser, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374289204 ISBN 13: 9780374289201

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it."

Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times."

A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

About this title

About the Author

Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, which Adam Zagajewski has called "one of the most original literary magazines not only in the U.S. but also on the entire planet." She is the author of eight previous books of nonfiction and one novel. Her recent books include the prizewinning Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen String Quartets. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. She divides her time between Berkeley, California, and New York City.

Reviews

Lesser’s taste is eclectic, her range large. She offers insights into George Orwell and Henning Mankell, Emily Dickinson and Roberto Bolaño, J.R. Ackerley and Shakespeare, Henry James and Isaac Asimov—to name but a few. There is no claim to a comprehensive approach, nor even a sense that what is discussed is of greater importance that what is not. […] The effect is rather as if Lesser were writing to a friend about the most fabolous literary party of all time, where she’d been in conversation not with authors but with their works. […] Her book is […] thoughtful and intelligent, conversational without being “improving,” and it ultimately encourages us to formulate our own responses, to continue and enlarge the literary conversation. —Claire Messud

Lesser, founder and editor of the Threepenny Review, brings her literary ardor and expertise to a delectably sophisticated inquiry into why reading is a constant source of pleasure and provocation. Celebrating the “close attention” reading engenders and literature’s embodiment of truth in however oblique a manner, she attends to novels, plays, poems, and essays. Lesser eschews the usual, pat book-lover musings and digs deep to illuminate the subtle themes named in such alluring chapter headings as “Novelty,” “Authority,” “Grandeur and Intimacy,” “Elsewhere,” and “Inconclusions.” Right off the bat, she challenges the assumption that Henry James writes psychological novels, observing that in his fiction, “Behavior is the manifestation of thought.” Her spiraling dissection of suspense and the dynamic between characters and plot pulls in Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hilary Mantel, and Richard Ford. Lesser’s inquiry into literary form, voice, thought, imagination, and satire leads her to Shakespeare, Milton, DeLillo, Bolaño, and Asimov. She closes this luxuriously fluent, sparklingly brilliant, and complexly exciting tribute to reading with a list, “A Hundred Books to Read for Pleasure.” --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374289204
• ISBN 13: 9780374289201
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240