Books for Living

Wavering between 3 and 4 stars... This “book about books” (a category for the Read Harder Challenge) was sometimes very good and sometimes felt thin. It did make me want to reread [b:Stuart Little 138959 Stuart Little E.B. White https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347367311s/138959.jpg 2884160] and [b:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2195464 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473397159s/2195464.jpg 2475030], and to add [b:Giovanni's Room 38462 Giovanni's Room James Baldwin https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493320612s/38462.jpg 814207] to my list, so I'll go with the 4 stars.

I took Books for Living off my Amazon wish list just before Christmas when I saw it was coming to my public library. Then I was sad that it took so long to get to the library (it always does though, doesn't it?) Finally it arrived, and, with great anticipation, I started jumped in. I love to read about books and one of my favorite subgenres of books-about-books is books-about-favorite-books. I worried a bit when I saw in the introduction that the author Will Schwalbe had had a great conversation about his favorite books on a plane with a fellow passenger and that one of the books the two had in common was The Alchemist (a book that didn't wow me). Nevertheless, I read on. I was disappointed to find that, while I had a few favorite books in common (The Little Prince, Bird by Bird, The Odyssey), there were a lot of forgettable books (at least forgettable to me) on the list, including Gift from the Sea and Girl on the Train and Rebecca, and there was a lot more memoir talk than book talk. Nevertheless, I may take a closer look at some of the books on Schwalbe's list that I haven't read, such as Lateral Thinking and The Importance of Living and Song of Solomon and A Little Life. In addition, to some good book recommendations, I love this little quote from his book:

“Now that my brother, sister, and I are all over fifty, my brother, using a golf analogy, refers to our lives as being played on the back nine—the first nine holes are behind us. Whatever score we've accumulated, we carry with us. Suddenly, finishing honorably and staying out of sand traps and water hazards matters more than seeing our names on the leaderboard.”