Like most book lovers, I enjoy reading books about books. I got Michael Dirda’s book, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books, from the local library here as an ebook. Since one of the points Dirda makes early in the book is how he only reads physical copies of books (never ebooks) there is, of course, an irony to my reading him that way. To quote Dirda,”Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts, but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books.”

As a loyal Kindle owner, I have found that there are books that work real well for me as ebooks and others that do not. Poetry for example never works in the ebook format. While Non-Fiction works quite well.

Yet when it comes to reading Scandinavian Noir, I have preferred it in ebook format. I have read all but one Henning Mankell book on my Kindle and all but two of Arnaldur Indriðason’s books, for example. I will need to do some more thinking about this for another posting.

Thinking about books, reading, and writing is what Browsings is all about because it is what Dirda is famous for. The eclectic nature of the essays and of his reading makes for fun and inspiring essays. His love for Edgar Rice Burroughs and old adventure novels dovetails nicely, for example, with my desire to read (and in some cases reread) some of the classics that I missed in my youth or read too young to fully appreciate.

For any reader, practically every page is filled with book recommendations to add to any want-to-read list. For book collectors like me, Dirda shares his own collecting philosophy and insights. In short, for anyone who loves books and reading, it is just what the doctor ordered in the bleak midwinter because it reminds us of why we love books in the first place.

Some Favorite Lines from Browsings

When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and flowery, he took to sleeping on a board.

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A writer’s greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes—even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.

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Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read?

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I fear that my decreasing interest in the contemporary indicates the onset of old age, or even old fogeyism.

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As readers grow older, their tastes often become more rarefied, more refined, more recherché. Certainly mine have. These days I gravitate increasingly to books almost no one else has heard of, let alone is interested in, books that are odd and quirky and usually out of print.

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As Somerset Maugham once said, if you would write perfectly, you would write like Voltaire.

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Leon Trotsky, no less, once said: “Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.”

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But I am a child of both the working class and the 1960s. I don’t like gross monetary favoritism. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

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Besides, with any justice, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good café in one corner, serving coffee and Guinness and kielbasa to keep up one’s strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria’s Secret catalogs. All my old friends will be there and sometimes we’ll take off a few millennia for an epic poker game and. . . .

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May I share a favorite, and famous, passage from Kafka? “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

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keep trying books outside your comfort zone. At least from time to time. True readers boldly go where they haven’t gone before.

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