Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books Author: Visit Amazon's Wendy Lesser Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0374289204 | Format: EPUB
Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books Description
From Booklist
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
From Bookforum
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
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- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 7, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374289204
- ISBN-13: 978-0374289201
- Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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