Bookish lives: reader's memoirs

Christian Century, May 18, 2004 by Trudy Bush

Unfortunately, the reader at times may agree with him. As his memoir moves away from childhood (it concludes with his graduation from Oberlin), it becomes more of a synopsis of books read and less an account of the life lived. The parents who were vivid figures in the early chapters drop out of the story, and Dirda gives no clue that his reading gave him insight into his relationship with his difficult father. Friends and attractive girls are briefly described, but few come alive. His tone of ironic amusement at his young self is finally too distancing. Dirda sees his life according to a venerable script--the Horatio Alger story. But focusing on the development of his skill as a reader and his progress in reading taste doesn't give that script much drama.

Sara Nelson's approach would not seem likely to be more gripping, but it is. She set out to read a hook a week for a year, and to record her experiences with those books. Is this a Benjamin Franklinesque attempt at self-improvement? Will it yield a year of book reports?

No, says Nelson. "What, I am doing, I think, is trying to get down on paper what I've been doing for years in my mind: matching up the reading experience with the personal one and watching where they intersect--or don't." The result is a lively, stimulating work that not only introduces us to the pleasures of books of all kinds, lilt tells us a great deal about Nelson.

Unlike Dirda, Nelson grew up in a home in which honks were as common as furniture. She wasn't much interested in them. As a teenager she preferred watching movies and dancing to reading. But when she began her first job and started living alone in New York, she found that "books were cheaper than movies, and easier to find than suitable human dates. And they could take lie with them to fabulous places."

Whereas Dirda's tastes were eclectic when young and became more and more Mandarin as be grew older, Nelson's began and stayed wide-ranging. As an editor for Glamour magazine and the publishing columnist for the New York Observer, site has had many books and manuscripts come her way. "Yet she tends to resist reading anything that has gotten a lot of hype. Like most of us, she finds her books in a variety of ways, often on the recommendation of friends.

Nelson confesses to judging people by what they read, even to choosing friends on that basis. She makes an exception for her husband, a determined nonreader, and the friend who loved Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. She can't understand how a book that for "192 artless pages extols wisdom that boils down to a) stop and smell the roses, b) don't sweat the small stuff, and c) concentrate not on money or status but on love of family and community" has been so successful.

The book does prompt her to wonder whether she and her husband are imparting enough wisdom to their son. Since they aren't religious, she thinks, they "might need to work harder to make sure he gets at home the basic messages he'd get at church or temple." With characteristic wit, she concludes: "'We'd better start soon, before Charley grows up to be a forty-year-old man content to seek out and be satisfied with the easy lessons in this book."