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by: Anna Quindlen
List Price: $10.00Amazon.com's Price: $8.00 You Save: $2.00 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780345422781
ISBN: 0345422783
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: August 25, 1998
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: August 25, 1998
Sales Rank: 58594
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
THE LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT is a groundbreaking series where America's finest writers and most brilliant minds tackle today's most provocative, fascinating, and relevant issues. Striking and daring, creative and important, these original voices on matters political, social, economic, and cultural, will enlighten, comfort, entertain, enrage, and ignite healthy debate across the country.
Amazon.com Review:
A recurring theme throughout Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is the comforting premise that readers are never alone. 'There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books,' she writes, 'a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but never really a stranger. My real, true world.' Later, she quotes editor Hazel Rochman: 'Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.' Indeed, Quindlen's essays are full of the names of 'friends,' real or fictional--Anne of Green Gables and Heidi; Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, to name just a few--who have comforted, inspired, educated, and delighted her throughout her life. In four short essays Quindlen shares her thoughts on the act of reading itself ('It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light'); analyzes the difference between how men and women read ('there are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers'); and cheerfully defends middlebrow literature: Most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the Iliad set a standard that could not be matched by What Makes Sammy Run? or Exodus. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated and that some of them are not addressed by Homer. The Canon, censorship, and the future of publishing, not to mention that of reading itself, are all subjects Quindlen addresses with intelligence and optimism in a book that may not change your life, but will no doubt remind you of other books that did. --Alix Wilber
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - So true
After eighteen years of being stereotyped as "the book worm," it's good to know that there's others out there like me. I agree wholeheartedly with Quindlen about the effect of books on life and on many of her other points. Her small book is simple but true. I can't wait to explore some of the books on her reading lists that I've not yet read. I recommend this to all of the other bookworms in the world: you are not alone, and at least one person understands you.
Rating:  - "...reading while they played."
Thus, Anna Quindlen quotes Charles Dickens' biographer, John Forster, in this slim and wonderful book. Apparently, Dickens, Quindlen, and I would all rather read than play or do almost anything else.
I adore this book because it reminds me that there are other people for whom reading goes way beyond a pass-time or even something that we "love" to do. In addition to life's other milestones, we can mark the phases of life with the books that we have read, devoured, and assimilated. ... Read More
Rating: - Thoughtful, fun, and quick
Quindlen writes about her experiences with being a bibliophile, ranging from discussing why fiction is worthwhile to what makes banned books so interesting to a critique of the snobbery of the literary critics. Her tangents are insightful and resonate with the trends I see in reading; for example, she characterizes the shift from reading for pleasure to reading for purpose: "whereas an executive might learn far more from Moby Dick ..., the book he was expected to have read might be The Seven Habits ... Read More
Rating: - Enjoyable read, great gift for booklovers
This delightful short book (or perhaps long essay) is filled with the insight and wisdom that characterizes Quindlen's work - touchingly personal while articulate and accessible, so much of her reminiscences resonate with the experiences of booklovers and writers. Her heartfelt adoration of the distinct pleasures reading can bring - as a child reading Nancy Drew while friends are out playing, or as an adult on an airplane traveling for business - were right on. Her praise of reading "for pleasure," ... Read More
Rating: - Quindlen Understands.
While this book can at times be a bit defensive, Quindlen has a right to be. Readers, she points out, have been belittled, called stuck up, and tracked down in police states. We're almost an endangered species. At times, I celebrated with her the joys of discovering a book sure to become a lifelong friend; at other moments, I found myself sniffling and holding back tears at encounters with people who do not, and never will, understand and so must belittle those of us who read.
At some points, ... Read More
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