The Reader's Shelf—Bookish for Books: Nonfiction for Bibliophiles

Edited by Nancy Pearl -- Library Journal, 11/1/2006

Sure, you read a lot, but would you consider yourself a bibliophile? Do you read the reviews, scan the best sellers lists, bet on the literary awards, follow the deals? Whatever your level of mania, sometimes there's nothing more satisfying to a book lover than a book about books. Luckily, there's no shortage of them.

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Owl: Holt. 1999. ISBN 0-8050-6176-2. pap. $20) established book columnist Nicholas A. Basbanes as one of the world's foremost bibliophiles. In his newest work, Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World (HarperCollins. 2005. ISBN 0-06-059323-7. $29.95), Basbanes ponders the variety of ways in which books influence readers, touching on such topics as the books Anne Frank read in hiding or those given to hostage Terry Waite.

Simon Winchester had a surprise best seller with his tale of word obsession and mental illness, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HarperCollins. 1998. ISBN 0-06-017596-6. $23; pap. Perennial. 1999. ISBN 0-06-099486-X. $13.95). His The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Univ. 2004. ISBN 0-19-517500-X. pap. $13.95) delves more deeply into the history of dictionaries, particularly the magisterial O.E.D.

In the wake of Winchester's success, several writers have found inspiring tales of human drama behind other monumental reference works. Henry Hitchings's Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (Farrar. 2005. ISBN 0-374-11302-5. $24) takes us back to a time when Samuel Johnson thought it plausible to write a comprehensive English dictionary essentially by himself and managed to succeed wittily. In Enlightening the World: Encyclopedie, The Book That Changed the Course of History (Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. ISBN 1-4039-6895-0. $29.95), Philipp Blom tells the story of how men such as Diderot, d'Alembert, de Jaucourt, and hundreds of others defied the authority of church and state, risking arrest and imprisonment, to produce a landmark of intellectual history.

Countless students who consult such tomes for their schoolwork wonder what it would be like to read an entire dictionary or encyclopedia. Would it make you smarter? A.J. Jacobs, worried that too much reality television was turning his brain to mush, decided to find out. In appropriately alphabetically arranged entries, he writes about his quest to read the entire 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and how it affected his life in The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (S. & S. 2004. ISBN 0-7432-5060-5. $25; pap. 2005. ISBN 0-7432-5062-1. $14). Jacobs may not have become the world's smartest man after finishing, but he clearly kept a sense of humor.

Aaron Lansky has exploits of his own to tell in Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (Algonquin. 2004. ISBN 1-56512-429-4. $24.95; pap. 2005. ISBN 1-56512-513-4. $13.95), such as being called in the middle of the night by a friend who tipped him off about thousands of Yiddish books spotted in a dumpster in New York City. It was about to rain. Could he come from Massachusetts right now? In Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (Bloomsbury, dist. by St. Martin's. 2004. ISBN 1-58234-404-3. pap. $14.95), Paul Collins recalls how he and his wife sold their San Francisco flat and brought their baby son to live in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, a small town known mainly for its abundance of antiquarian bookstores. There the struggling scribe finished one book and found inspiration for another.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random. 2003. ISBN 0-375-50490-7. $23.95; pap. 2003. ISBN 0-8129-7106-X. $14.95) was another surprise best seller. Before leaving Iran to teach in the United States, Nafisi led a clandestine group of her brightest female students in reading Western classics by authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry James. Their thoughtful engagement with literature is inspiring, especially the way they let literature speak to their own challenging lives.

Facing a writing crisis, novelist Jane Smiley also looked to great works of literature for inspiration—100 great novels. In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf. 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4059-0. $26.95), Smiley discusses the literary form in broad terms, analyzes different types of novels, gives advice to rookie novelists, and then briefly discusses each of the 100 works she read, which ranged from classics like Cervantes's Don Quixote to lesser-known works such as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows.