Corrigan - Leave Me Alone, Im Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

Table of Contents

This book is dedicated to my father,
John Joseph Corrigan (1920-1997),
and to my husband, Richard Yeselson.

Two champion readers; two great dads

Bet you didnt learn anything about foundations when you were in graduate school for English.

remark made by basement-waterproofing contractor inNovember 2003 as he was writing out a $10,000 estimate for drainingthe leaky basement of my row house, where some 4,000 books are shelved

Acclaim for Maureen Corrigans Leave Me Alone, Im Reading

A wonderful work that strikes a pitch-perfect balance between erudite literary criticism and common sense.

The Columbus Dispatch

A fine apology for bibliophilia.... [Corrigan] segues from perceptive discussion of novels by Austen, the Bronts and Anna Quindlen to her own life, including her journey to China to adopt a child.... Funny and insightful.... A celebration of the fellowship of bookworms.

San Jose Mercury News

This reflective and entertaining memoir is about more than just books. Its about being a daughter and an adoptive mother, a student and a teacher, a feminist and a skeptical Catholicabout being Maureen Corrigan. Learning about Maureens life made me think about how my own life was shaped by books.

Terry Gross, host of NPRs Fresh Air

Corrigan deals... with that intimate connection between reading and life, launching many of her critiques with personal anecdotes in a seamless blend of autobiography, literary criticism and essay.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

What will most draw fellow bookworms in and delight them about Corrigans book is her appreciation of how books can be like people affecting you in ways you were not expecting, pushing you when you need the push, and forcing you to look at your own life differently.... [A] heart-felt journey through life and literature and its transects.

Gothamist.com

If you wonder about the secret life of bookworms, this is the book that will open up the rich rewards of going around with your nose stuck in a book.... Delightful, absorbing, and engaging.

Bobbie Ann Mason, author of An Atomic Romance

[Corrigan is] an intelligent, unpretentious critic whose love of booksall kinds of bookscomes across in both her radio reviews and her engaging new memoir.... Engrossing.

The Journal News (Westchester County, New York)

An educated and engaging discussion of some of the authors favorite books and how she thinks theyve affected her life.... A thoughtfully assembled reading list... should inspire you to explore some of the books she mentions.

New York Post

Splendid.... Whether your taste runs to Pride and Prejudice or TheMaltese Falcon, you will love Leave Me Alone, Im Reading. Its the book for people who love books.

Susan Isaacs, author of Any Place I Hang My Hat

For anyone who regards a trip to the bookstore as an all-day event or who might judge new acquaintances by the number of volumes in their living rooms, Leave Me Alone, Im Reading is a must read.

The Portland Tribune

A little gem.

Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

From the first page of the introduction to Leave Me Alone, Im Reading, I knew I was in the hands of another book luster. I valued her insights into contemporary and classical literature and the connections she made to her own life, but I especially loved her enthusiasm for books and the act of reading.

Nancy Pearl, author of

More Book Lust: Recommended Readings forEvery Mood, Moment, and Reason

Introduction

Its not that I dont like people. Its just that when Im in the company of otherseven my nearest and dearestthere always comes a moment when Id rather be reading a book.

And, for many hours of almost every day, thats what Im doing. I have a great jobor, to be more accurate, cluster of jobsfor a bookworm. I read for a living. For the past sixteen years Ive been the book critic for the NPR program Fresh Air. Just about every week, I read a new book and review it for Fresh Airs approximately four and a half million listeners. I get paid to read, to think, to share opinions about literature. I also write a regular Mysteries column for The WashingtonPost and review books for other newspapers and journals.

Do you ever get tired of reading? people sometimes ask meparticularly people whove seen the inside of my house, where stacks of books are piled on the dining room table, the floor of my bedroom and study, even on the radiators in summertime. The truthful answer is Rarely. There are those occasional stretches where Ill review three new novels in a row that are all about five hundred pages long and packed with nature descriptions and I push myself to finish these books out of professional duty rather than pleasure. But theres always another, possibly better book on the horizon that Im curious about, another world to lose myself in. After more than a decade of weekly reviewing, during which, on average, I receive about fifty new books a week sent to my house by publishers hoping for a review on Fresh Air, I still feel an upsurge of curiosity every time I rip open another cardboard book box to look at the new title inside. Theres always a chance that this new novel or work of nonfiction will be a book Ill love, a book that Ill pass on to friends and rave about on Fresh Air; a book that changes the way I read my own life. For the chance of finding such magicas I do maybe ten times a yearI misspend hours of my life reading what turn out to be the wrong books: biographies promoting glib psychological keys to their subjects, or novels that go nowhere, or mysteries narrated by cats. No pain, no gain.

In addition to being a book critic, Im a professor of literature (for the past sixteen years at Georgetown University). Again, a nice job for a compulsive reader, especially since it allows me to escape the relentless pressure of reading hot-off-the-press books and return, again and again, to familiar literary workssome classic, some personal favorites that havent been anointed as canonical. Years ago I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on, among other figures, the twentieth-century British social critic and artist Eric Gill. Gill was a gifted coiner of aphorisms, and one in particular has always stayed with me: The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes to do only when he is not at work. According to Gills definition, through the grace of literature, Im a free man.

But heres a catch: I live an intensely bookish life during a resolutely nonliterary era. An absurdly small number of people in America care about what I or any other book critic has to say about the latest novel or work of nonfiction. Despite the proliferation of mega-bookstores and neighborhood reading groups, most Americans are indifferent to the lure of literature: in fact, according to a Wall Street Journal article of a few years ago, some 59 percent of Americans dont own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible. Just as I find that statistic incomprehensible, a lot of people consider what I do for a living fairly pointless, as the epigraph to this book demonstrates. All that reading and so little material reward. My own mother, whos always dazzled by my facility in answering questions in the literature category on