Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER .Anna Quindlen presents a ""swift and compelling paean to the joys of books"" (Booklist). ""Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, How Reading Changed My Life is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.""-Publishers Weekly ""Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in which we recognize universal comfort-God, sex, food, family, friends-reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in a chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. . . . I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth.""-from How Reading Changed My Life

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Reviews

This brief in favor of reading is every bit as gooey and obvious as its title would indicate. Once again we are reminded that a book is like a frigate, that books have made knowledge available to the masses, that there is a certain despotism of the educated, an academic snootiness, that disparages popular reading (one of Quindlen's college professors disdained Galsworthy, a writer Quindlen then adored). While Quindlen professes herself to be democratic in matters of taste, she seems caught in the self-contradiction that is inevitable when one declares that all reading is valuable - serving to expand the mind, heart, and imagination - while also trying to reserve room for the exercise of critical judgment. Still, despite the fact that Pulitzer-winning journalist and novelist Quindlen (One True. Thing, 1994; Black and Blue, 1998) is preaching to the choir, she relates some charming and amusing anecdotes, such as the time her mother hurled the latest Book-of-the-Month Club selection across the room, leaving the offensive volume for a teenage Anna to pick up - it was Portnoy's Complaint: Didn't she know that I would . . . [hear] her distress signal as the clarion cry to forbidden fruit? She astutely goes on to note that it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive. From Martin Luther to Betty Friedan, she notes, sedition has been the point of the written word. Her own writing here, alas, lacks both sedition and seduction. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Anna Quindlen is the author of many bestselling books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling novel Rise and Shine, the #1 bestselling memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life. Her other novels include Blessings, One True Thing, the Oprah Book Club Selection Black and Blue, and Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

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