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Notes on Reading and Life
Henry Holt
May 2006
192 pages ISBN: 0805078770 Trade Size
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Fiction
A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s often surprising
meditation on those places where life and books intersect
and what might be learned from both Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure.Yet there
is another equally important, though often overlooked,
reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have
always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in
which they instruct, cajole, and convince remains a subject
of some mystery. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss
and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer
prize–winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit,
wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and
enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work
to love and death. Organized by significant life events and abounding with
quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book
showcases Dirda’s considerable knowledge, which he wears
lightly. Favoring showing rather than telling, Dirda draws
the reader deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known
works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an
eye to what is relevant to how we might better understand
our lives.
No awards found for this book.
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