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Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

Lynne Sharon Schwartz · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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One for the Books

Joe Queenan · 244 pages

One of America's leading humorists seriously examines his own obsession with books. Joe Queenan became a voracious reader as a means of escape from a joyless childhood in a Philadelphia housing project. In the years since then he has dedicated himself to an assortment of idiosyncratic reading challenges: spending a year reading only short books, spending a year reading books he always suspected he

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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My Reading Life

Pat Conroy · 331 pages

Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life.

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

Susan Hill · 236 pages

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade i

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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How To Be a Heroine

Samantha Ellis · 272 pages

BookishEssay CollectionLiterary CriticismMemoir & Biography
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The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else

Christopher R. Beha · 258 pages

Recounts how the author set out to read all of the Harvard Classics in an effort to get his life back on track after a serious illness and to discover how the great writers of the past grappled with essential questions of existence.

BookishLiterary CriticismMemoir & BiographyEssay Collection
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With Borges

Alberto Manguel · 91 pages

"In Buenos Aires, 1964, a blind writer approaches a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk asking him if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. "The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest literary minds; the boy was Alberto Manguel, who was later to become an internationally acclaimed author and bibliophile. "The young Manguel spent several years reading aloud an

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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Books for Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life

Will Schwalbe · 342 pages

From the author of the international bestseller The End of Your Life Book Club , an inspiring and magical exploration of the enduring power of books - a must for all passionate book lovers, exploring books as diverse as The Girl on the Train , The Little Prince and David Copperfield . 'I've always believed that everything you need to know can be found in a book.' Will Schwalbe Why is it that we re

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading

Sara Nelson · 242 pages

The interplay between our lives and our books is the subject of this unique memoir by publishing correspondent and self-described "readaholic" Sara Nelson. From Solzhenitsyn to Laura Zigman, Catherine M. to Captain Underpants, the result is a personal chronicle of insight, wit, and infectious enthusiasm. Nelson writes, "Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who

BookishLiterary CriticismMemoir & BiographyEssay Collection
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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman · 144 pages

In these eighteen essays, Anne Fadiman "recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language."--Jacket. Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from an

BookishLiterary CriticismMemoir & BiographyEssay Collection
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Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books

Cara Nicoletti · 283 pages

"As a young bookworm reading in her grandfather's butcher shop, Cara Nicoletti saw how books and food bring people to life. Now a butcher, cook, and talented writer, she serves up stories and recipes inspired by beloved books and the food that gives their characters depth and personality. From the breakfast sausage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods to chocolate cupcakes with

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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The Child that Books Built

Francis Spufford · 219 pages

"To understand the thrall of fiction, Spufford goes back to his earliest encounters with books, exploring such beloved classics as The Wind in the Willows, The Little House on the Prairie, and the Narnia chronicles. He re-creates the excitement of discovery, writing joyfully of the moment when fuzzy marks on a page become words, which then reveal - a dragon. Weaving together child development, pe

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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My Life in Middlemarch

Rebecca Mead · 293 pages

"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description. "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the gr

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

Pamela Paul · 256 pages

"Imagine keeping a record of every book you ever read. What would those titles say about you? With humor and warmth, the editor of The New York Times Book Review shares the stories that have shaped her life. For twenty-eight years, Pamela Paul has been keeping a diary that records the books she reads, rather than the life she leads. Or does it? Over time, it's become clear that this Book of Books,

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The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman · 297 pages

Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.

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Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Michael Chabon · 222 pages

A series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.

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The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison

Mikita Brottman · 230 pages

"A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men's prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them--Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran. On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club wit

Literary CriticismBookishMemoir & BiographyEssay Collection
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Negotiating with the Dead

Margaret Atwood · 219 pages

What is the role of the Writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain--or excuse!--their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionMemoir & Biography
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Dear Fahrenheit 451: A Librarian's Love Letters and Break-Up Notes to the Books in Her Life

Annie Spence · 282 pages

If you love to read, and presumably you do since you've picked up this book, you know that some books affect you so profoundly they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it's clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end. In Dear Fahrenheit 45

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionNonfiction
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Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books

Michael Dirda · 246 pages

Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize he was awarded for his reviews in The Washington Post, he picked up an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for his most recent book, On Conan Doyle. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionNonfiction
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The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Erin Blakemore · 224 pages

In this compelling book of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, Erin Blakemore explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara, Scout Finch and Jo March can inspire women today.

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This is Not the End of the Book

Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carriere · 348 pages

This beautifully produced book, an object of desire in itself, is the transcription of a long conversation between the two men in which they discuss a vast range of subjects, from what can be defined as the first book, to the idea of the library, the burning of books both accidental and deliberate, and what will happen to knowledge and memory when infinite amounts of information are available at t

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionNonfiction
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The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

Nick Hornby · 278 pages

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionNonfiction
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Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach · 230 pages

Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and visiting writers of the Lost Generation, a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderso

BookishLiterary CriticismMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Francine Prose · 296 pages

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In *Reading Like a Writer*, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—[Dostoyevsky][1], [Flaubert][2], [

BookishLiterary CriticismEssay CollectionNonfiction

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