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Random House
September 2005
240 pages
ISBN: 0375504257
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
As book reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air and contributor to many
publications, Maureen Corrigan literally reads for a living.
For as long as she can remember, books have been at the
center of her life, a never-failing source of astonishment,
hard truths, new horizons, and welcome companionship. Now
Corrigan has added a volume of her own to the shelf of
classics, by reading her life of reading with all the
attention to complexity, wit, and intelligence that any good
book–or life–deserves. Part memoir, part coming-of-age story, and part reflection
on favorite and influential books, Leave Me Alone, I’m
Reading views the world through an open book. From her
unpretentious girlhood in the working-class neighborhood of
Sunnyside, Queens, to her bemused years in an Ivy League
Ph.D. program, from the whirl of falling in love and
marrying (a fellow bookworm, of course), to the ordeal of
adopting a baby overseas, Corrigan has always had a book at
her side. We read this life in reverse as Corrigan begins the book as
a “professional reader” always conscious of the many people,
like her own mother, who don’t “get” the power of reading,
and we end up as a fly on the wall of this only child in
Queens, transported to exciting yet threatening worlds
beyond her small apartment, a block from the #7 subway. Corrigan’s references range from Richard Wright to Philip
Roth to Chekhov, but certain themes emerge. Corrigan
subverts the classic “man conquers mountain or ocean or
battlefield” genre by juxtaposing it with what she calls
“female extreme adventure novels”–books such as Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, and
Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue, which feature women quietly
fighting for their lives. Hard-boiled detective stories that cloak social criticisms
of work and family beneath their protagonist’s trench
coat–-Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Gaudy Night by
Dorothy L. Sayers, Sara Paretsky’s mysteries–are another
abiding passion. More surprising, and perhaps more
revealing, is her taste for tales of Catholic martyrs and
secular saints, a holdover from her days in parochial school
that left an indelible impression. Moving from page to life and back again, Corrigan writes
ultimately of fashioning a complicated, sometimes
contradictory self out of her class background, her
classroom teaching, and her own classics of literature; a
list of favorite books is also included. In Leave Me Alone,
I’m Reading, Maureen Corrigan invites us to accompany her on
the journey of a lifetime.
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