Books about book-people

Que si j’eusse esté parmy ces nations qu’on dit vivre encore
souz la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure
que je m’y fusse tres−volontiers peint tout entier, Et tout nud.
Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy−mesme la matiere de mon livre.
. . . Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (1533-1592)

If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my blog. Bob the Scientist (1954 - not.yet).

Although The Blob has a tendency to range widely over time and space (including a glance at Michael de Montaigne), it might be said that its point is to record everything I can remember of my own life built up in 600 word blocks. Biography in metaphorical Lego. It is nit-pickingly detailed about the last 11 years (because recorded within a few hours of each event) and sparse indeed for earlier times. My family groan when I trot out one of my well rehearsed anecdotes for company. Jakers, Pa, did nothing else happen in 1971??

Thus, it's all about meee, but two recent ear-books have also been what do we talk about when we talk about readers [phrase tip Lanchester, Carver]. 

① The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians : True stories of the magic of reading, ostensibly by James "Churn 'em out" Patterson and Matt Eversmann but actually a compendium of authentic voices of those who work in the book-trade. Several of these workers at the coal-face of literacy have a version of the Blue Book meme (Customer: "I wonder if you can help me re-find a book I enjoyed at a teenager? . . . it had a blue cover") and many of them have heart-warming tales of getting the dispossessed into the world of books. I'm guessing that the named authors thought up the idea and corralled the several dozen narrators into getting something about their lives down on paper. Probably bashed some of the less coherent tales (you can love books, read a lorra books, but still not be a natural writer) into shape.  And several have benefitted from Patterson's Page Turner scheme to use his million$ to support independent bookstores.

② Shannon Reed's Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out.. This is more cohesive and long-form because, like The Blob, it selectively samples the life and times of a single teacher of Lit at Pitt. If you're quick <link-rot, paywall alert> you can snag an excerpt of Reed's musings about Lincoln in the Bardo filtered through the lit-blog of George "Lincoln in the Bardo" Saunders. Which really is as recursively back-scratching louse-riffling as it sounds but nevertheless gives you, dear reader, an appetizer for the style of Why We Read - cw: can be larf out loud funny. As you should expect from a book by Reed about who / how to Read, it reads easy but offers insight into the hard graft involved in proper writing. Not the easy one-time-pass gab of The Blob, but something which has been drafted and copy-editted and redrafted . . . and redrafted [and shared and feed-backed] until the document is living its best life into posterity. One of the nice anecdotes is when students at a creative writing class get to realise that they are not cut out to be a writer but will so be a much better, more critical, less superficial, reader for having taken Reed's course.

I've returned both these books to the Borrowbox available bin; but you'll have to get in line behind Dau.I the Librarian who tag-teamed them after me.