The top 10 books about reading

I wasn’t aware of the term “bibliomemoir” until the novelist Joyce Carol Oates used it – or perhaps coined it? – in reviewing my book, The Road to Middlemarch, earlier this year. But it’s a fitting enough label for the extended family my book belongs to: books that explicitly consider reading as a crucial dimension of living, or that explore the post-publication life that a significant book has led.

As I was writing my book my husband, George Prochnik, was the other end of our house writing his own, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, about the mid-century Austrian writer. It was not until both books were published that we realised they were, in a sense, twins: his concerned with the disorientating anguish of exile, and mine with the melancholy joy of homecoming.

My favorite books about books, or about reading, are those in which the writer has not felt it necessary to hide his or her own personal involvement in the subject – or to limit its disclosure to a preface or afterword – but instead has taken his or her own investment as a starting point. Reading isn’t a terribly dramatic activity to write about, admittedly. But since all real writers are also readers, it is, for some of us at least, a compelling, indeed unavoidable, subject. I bet if skydivers could skydive about skydiving, they would.

1. U and I by Nicholson Baker

Baker got there first – or at least early – with U and I, published in 1992. This short, startlingly original book marvelously meditates upon, and conveys, one writer’s compulsive obsession with another: in Baker’s case, John Updike.

2. To the River by Olivia Laing

Laing’s book about a trip taken along the Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf ended her life, is a gorgeous, exquisitely written genre mash-up. In it, travel writing, biography, essay and personal memoir are woven together, to symphonic effect.

3. Portrait of A Novel by Michael Gorra

Gorra’s book does two things at once, brilliantly: it delivers a satisfying Life of Henry James, and gives a fascinating account of the origins and afterlife of The Portrait of a Lady. A third thing— it happily betrays a scholar’s love for his subject.

4. The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Batuman tackles a syllabus-full of Russian heavyweights – Babel, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – and in so doing provides a winning, comic memoir of graduate student life and its discontents.

5. How to Live by Sarah Bakewell

How to Live revisits the essays of Montaigne, linking their themes with the course of Montaigne’s own life, and delightfully explicating their enduring applicability to everyone else’s.

6. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

This was another early entrant into the field of books about reading books. Published in 1997, it is a beguiling tour through the works, letters, and life of Marcel Proust, executed in the genre of self-help with subversive irony.

7. Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer

Wonderfully titled, Out of Sheer Rage is a virtuoso example of the books about readers genre: in the guise of a study of the life and work of DH Lawrence, it is a gripping account of the life and work of Geoff Dyer.

8. Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose

One of my favorite critical books: a study of Victorian marriage refracted through the lives of five famous literary couples. In her more recent work, The Shelf, Rose is excellent company as she works her way along a single shelf of the New York Society Library, discovering gems and dreck as she goes.

9. The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller

Miller is a book critic for Salon magazine; someone who’s had the good fortune to turn her love of reading into a career. In The Magician’s Book she tells where that love began, in the world of Narnia, and shows how literature can work its spell on a young reader.

10. A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter by William Deresiewicz

Deresiewicz uses the works of Austen to tells of his maturation as a reader and as a man. And along the way provides astute, accessible analyses of her novels.