Books About Books

Lately, I've been reading books about books. I started with Pat Conroy's excellent My Reading Life and Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, both reviewed earlier on this blog. Later, I read Alan Jacobs' less lively The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs works really hard, too hard, to tell us it's OK to read frivolous books and it's also OK to ignore all those must-read lists. The problem is, I ended up forcing myself to finish reading Jacobs' own sometimes tedious book.

Now, I'm reading Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home. It is absolutely delightful. It's the kind of book I grab when I wake up in the middle of the night and read another page or two. I take the light-weight paperback -- just 236 pages -- to the restroom with me. I carry it to work in the hope of a few free moments. I knew I could identify with Hill when she dared to admit she dislikes reading Jane Austen. Gasp!... At last, I realized: I am not alone among so-called educated people who struggle to enjoy Pride and Prejudice.

Somewhere in between Howards End Is on the Landing and Jacobs' book, I read and largely enjoyed Richard Horan's book, Seeds: One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers From Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. Horan's book is an offbeat combination of travel writing, botany and literature. It's full of interesting facts about the writers whose homes and trees he visits while collecting seeds to start legacy trees.

We learn, for instance, that the Tree of Heaven in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now considered invasive. We also learn that George Washington's legendary false teeth weren't wooden but were ivory. Outside the home of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, Horan gathered cherry seeds from her Pennsylvania yard, where nature thankfully is not yet silenced. At Carson McCullers' home, he collected bright-red magnolia seeds. He tells us how to transplant those seeds -- something I now hope to do with my own small magnolia tree and its seeds.

Books about books may sound like a waste of time. But I find I sometimes get other reading ideas in them, and it's also interesting to learn what others think about literary works I've sometimes loved, sometimes hated or just never got around to reading.