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A review by david_r_grigg
Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education by Michael Dirda
5.0
Bound to Please is a wonderful book. Subtitled An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education, it’s just what it says on the box.
It’s a compilation of book reviews and a few essays by Michael Dirda, who is the book critic for the Washington Post . He is extraordinarily well-read, and is able to bring his vast experience as a reader to write illuminating reviews of an eclectic collection of books. Each article pulls you in, even when he’s looking at books and authors who you may not have read or will never read.
Dirda’s reviews are so well written that this volume is hard to put down. Just as you feel you’ve had enough, your eye drifts to the next article and before you know it you’re reading a review of the collected letters of Flaubert, or of a biography of John Ruskin, or of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or of the collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges or… As I say, a very wide-ranging, eclectic selection of literature.
It’s delightful to me that Dirda is so enthusiastic about so many authors who I have already experienced and enjoyed: A. S. Byatt, Phillip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, Anthony Trollope, Edith Nesbit and many more. He’s a big fan of quality science fiction as well as the classics. Amazingly, he even knows his comic books. In fact, at times you feel that this man has read every book in the world.
And he makes you want to read everything too. It’s almost enough to make you despair, as you read the next review and think My gosh, I’d like to read that. If one only had but world enough and time…
This is a book which will make you fall in love with reading all over again. It’s a treasury of delights.
It’s a compilation of book reviews and a few essays by Michael Dirda, who is the book critic for the Washington Post . He is extraordinarily well-read, and is able to bring his vast experience as a reader to write illuminating reviews of an eclectic collection of books. Each article pulls you in, even when he’s looking at books and authors who you may not have read or will never read.
Dirda’s reviews are so well written that this volume is hard to put down. Just as you feel you’ve had enough, your eye drifts to the next article and before you know it you’re reading a review of the collected letters of Flaubert, or of a biography of John Ruskin, or of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or of the collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges or… As I say, a very wide-ranging, eclectic selection of literature.
It’s delightful to me that Dirda is so enthusiastic about so many authors who I have already experienced and enjoyed: A. S. Byatt, Phillip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, Anthony Trollope, Edith Nesbit and many more. He’s a big fan of quality science fiction as well as the classics. Amazingly, he even knows his comic books. In fact, at times you feel that this man has read every book in the world.
And he makes you want to read everything too. It’s almost enough to make you despair, as you read the next review and think My gosh, I’d like to read that. If one only had but world enough and time…
This is a book which will make you fall in love with reading all over again. It’s a treasury of delights.