Ex Libris

I was really excited to read this book. It's beautiful, and I love finding new books I haven't read yet. But if I could get my money back for this one, and the wasted time, I would. First, it's more a collection of college newspaper book reviews than a love letter to great books. Reading it, I thought the author was some 22 year old. Come to find out, she's supposedly some highly acclaimed New York Times book critic who is old enough to know better. Second, it's boring. I wasn't inspired to add a single book to my reading list, and found myself just wanting it to be over. Third, too many quotations and too many name drops. And finally, more write ups mention Trump than don't. It's out of place in a book like this, and leaves us feeling as if the author is a petulant child - and an uneducated one at that. She needlessly inserts her political beliefs in her summaries, and with a complete unawareness of the irony. Don't waste your time on this one.

Enjoyed finishing one book filled with recommendations of other books. While this is not a story of any kind and is actually just a list of book recommendations, Michiko Kakutani, now-retired literary critic for The New York Times, delivers a wonderful spread of books, old and new, that are especially pertinent in today's world to either read or be reread either for the magic of reading or to learn/create a better world for tomorrow. Kakutani delivers a succinct review of each book, each filled with beautiful language and interesting connections to both historical and contemporary events.

I love reading books about books and reading. Kakutani's prologue was a love letter to books and reading from a literary critic and is one that every one–reader and non-reader alike–should read to understand what reading is and why it is so beloved and important in our world.

Quotes:

“The pleasure of reading,' Virginia Woolf wrote, “is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it.' In fact, she argued, the reason we have grown from apes to men and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked, and given to the poor and helped the sick, the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this: we have loved reading.”

“Today in our contentious and fragmented world, reading matters more than ever. For one thing, books offer the sort of in-depth experience that's increasingly rare in our distracted, ADD age. Be it the sense of magical immersion offered by a compelling novel or the deep meditative thinking triggered by a wise or provocative work of non-fiction. Books can open a startling window on history. They can give us an all-access pass to knowledge both old and new
Most of all, books can catalyze empathy. Something more and more precious in our increasingly polarized and tribal world. ‘Reading,' Gene Reeves once wrote, ‘makes immigrants of us all. It takes away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.'“
[Reading] does what education and travel do. It exposes us to a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints. Literature, as the David Foster Wallace has pointed out, gives the reader, marooned in her own skull, imaginative access to other selves.”

‘“You read something which you thought only happened to you,” James Baldwin once said, “and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. That is why art is important.”‘

After a lifetime of reading, Michiko Kakutani has come up with her list of 100 books to read and reread. She excluded a lot of classics, she tells us; there are lots of great classics lists out there. Instead, she tried to focus on recent books, the novels, stories, and memoirs by contemporary authors that help illuminate many of our present troubles.

I don't agree with all of her choices—I'm not a fan of Educated or Americanah, for example, and Housekeeping is the weakest Marilynne Robinson, I think—but she includes wonderful commentary in addition to her list that explains her choices and that is important, too.

What did I add to my list of books to read? Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.