The joys of reading books about books

There’s a special satisfaction in reading books about books. These come in many varieties. There are collected essays by writers and critics, volumes about private and public libraries, histories of specific books, and meditations on how books have helped people get through difficult times. It’s a genre by itself.

Alberto Manguel, former director of the National Library of Argentina, has made this something of a specialty. His histories of reading, reading diaries, and accounts of unpacking his library are rich and rewarding. Others such as novelist and translator Tim Parks periodically publish collected essays with reflections on books and authors.

Many make individuality a virtue. Novelist Anna Quindlen’s How Reading Changed My Life, about her profound relationship with books over the years, includes lists such as ‘10 books I would save in a fire’, and ‘10 books that will help a teenager feel more human’. More recently, there was My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review. The Bob in question is her Book of Books: a journal in which she’s made notes on every book she’s ever read.

Two new books continue this tradition in different ways. The first, by Michiko Kakutani, formerly feared and revered book reviewer for The New York Times; and the second, by novelist and memoirist Cathy Rentzenbrink.

Kakutani’s Ex Libris also happens to be the title of another beloved book about books by Anne Fadiman. It deals with, as the subtitle has it, 100+ books to read and re-read, and the selection is enlivened by striking Art Deco-ish illustrations by Dana Tanamachi.

Reading matters more than ever, Kakutani affirms, whether it’s because of “the sense of magical immersion offered by a compelling novel, or the deep, meditative thinking triggered by a wise or provocative work of nonfiction.”

This, in a manner of speaking, is her own canon, and it has a decidedly American, or at least Western slant. (That means no One Thousand and One Nights or Panchatantra.) As she writes, “the selections here are subjective and decidedly arbitrary…It was difficult to whittle my choices down to a hundred.”

Many usual suspects lurk between these covers. There’s Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (which is among the few books in translation to make the cut).

There are some surprises, though. The collection includes four books by and about Mohammad Ali, including his The Greatest: My Own Story and David Remnick’s The King of the World. Her reasons? “Muhammad Ali not only rocked the world with his electrifying speed and power in the ring. He also shook the world with the force of his convictions.”

Elsewhere, Flaubert is included not because of Madame Bovary but by a selection of his letters edited by Francis Steegmuller. Among other unusual mentions are Will Friedwald’s Sinatra: The Song is You, as well as Life by Keith Richards with James Fox.

Many recommendations clearly and consciously speak to our current moment. These are books about the retreat of Western liberalism, such as Richard Haass’s A World in Disarray; those by Joseph Ellis on the founding of the American republic; and works on democracy and tyranny such as Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die.

The chosen few among writers with subcontinental roots are VS Naipaul (A House for Mr Biswas), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh), and Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake). A pity there’s no RK Narayan or Anita Desai, although, as Kakutani repeats, she “could easily have added another hundred books that are equally powerful, moving, or timely.”

Ex Libris is at its most engaging in the all-too-brief moments when Kakutani talks about her own reading life. In the introduction, for example, she says that as an only child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary. “I read under the blankets at night with a flashlight. I read in the school library during recess in hopes of avoiding the playground bullies. I read in the backseat of the car, even though it made me carsick.”

In contrast, Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books is as personal as it gets. It starts with her unpacking her books after moving to Cornwall, making piles of the most treasured ones, and reading through them in the reassuring knowledge that there are many more to come. In unpretentious and winsome prose, she then takes us on an odyssey through the milestones of her life, each one foregrounded by the books that accompanied her.

“Reading built me,” she writes, “and always has the power to put me back together again.” Of her childhood favourites, she confesses to still revisiting Narnia in her dreams. There’s also Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children, LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and even Captain WE Johns’s Biggles Learns to Fly.

Books have been her constant companions, from schooldays to working in a pub to journeys overseas, followed by marriage and parenthood. Of the time after her brother’s tragic and accidental death, she writes that “the act of reading itself…became a life raft, allowing me to stay afloat and keep my head above the water.”

This, then, is one of the powers of literature: “to comfort, to console, to allow a tiny oasis of -- not exactly pleasure, but perhaps we could think of it as respite, when we feel we might otherwise drown in a sea of pain.”

Some of the most appealing sections are to do with her time working in bookshops such as Hatchards and branches of Waterstones. At one place, an American tourist hesitates before buying Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, wondering whether it’s too heavy for her suitcase. “Throw away some clothes,” Rentzenbrink says, and the woman buys it. To another customer, she remarks: “I really do think people should buy books rather than food.”

Intermingled with this are short lists relating to her personal circumstances over the years. Thus, there are Fictional Diaries, Pub Books, Books about Bookshops, Books about Mothering, and more. It’s a fetching bibliographical portrait of a devoted reader who, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, firmly believes that “we are all in the gutter, but books allow us to see the stars.”

Recommendations and reminders apart, one of the joys of reading these and other books about books is that they bring back to us what it’s like to be lost in a book. They’re also a companionable reassurance that we aren’t the only ones to feel that way. The pleasure of reading is so great, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, “that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is.”

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.