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(2.5) Such a mixed bag. A couple of these chapters are top-notch autobiographical essays worthy of standing alone: the one about Giovanni’s Room telling of how his boarding school librarian helped him accept that he was gay through the books she left out for him reminded me of the best bits of John Irving’s In One Person; another about The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown gives a short history of how AIDS shattered his innocence in the 1980s. I also liked pieces about Gift from the Sea and A Little Life.

But then there are the chapters on Stuart Little and Anne Lamott that never rise about plot summary � always a danger in books about books; the spoilers (he’s ruined the ending of Bartleby, the Scrivener for me); the pure filler (The Girl on the Train � come on!); the pointless adulation (Toni Morrison is brilliant, in case you didn’t know); a couple arguments I simply don’t agree with (The Odyssey calls for us to be content with our mediocrity? Hardly! Bartleby teaches us that it’s okay to be a quitter? Pah!); and the obsession with Lin Yutang’s 1937 self-help book The Importance of Living, which he cites so often that, rather than encouraging me to read it for myself, he makes me perversely want to avoid it entirely.

All of this means that, although I can sympathize with a lot of Schwalbe’s general sentiments about what reading does for us (see the quotes below) and found this to be a quick and cozy read, it’s quite the disappointment after The End of Your Life Book Club and overall smacks of being written and extended in a hurry to meet a deadline. It should never have gone beyond a handful of occasional essays. Or, if it was to be published someday, it should have had a much longer germination period, with only the very best essays selected from a huge crop.

“Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone; it’s a solitary activity that connects you to others.�

“I’m on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I’m at it.�

“‘What are you reading?� isn’t a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it’s really a way of asking, ‘Who are you now and who are you becoming?’�

Yüan Chunglang: “You can leave the books that you don’t like alone, and let other people read them.�

(I won a copy via the blog Linda’s Book Bag.)