Now that I'm nearly done with grad school, and therefore almost human again and possessed of time to do more leisure reading and write about it, I can get back to this blog! Fittingly, I'm making my return writing a book that was both a graduation gift (thanks, Grandma!) and a memoir of another avid reader. Pamela Paul, now editor of The New York Times Book Review, has kept a diary in which she lists what she's read (her Book of Books, a.k.a. Bob) since her late teens. This book is the basis for this very readable* memoir, which focuses not so much on the books she's read but on how her reading habit has shaped her as a person and the course of her personal and professional life. (Hint: you don't end up editor of the NYT Book Review by not reading.) If you like memoirs, or if you like books about the power of reading, I'd definitely recommend My Life with Bob. (See also Chapters Fifty-Five (2/14) and One Hundred One (11/14) for two other readers' memoirs that I particularly enjoyed.)
*Except for the chapter on children's literature--all I could hear were my many children's literature professors' voices (and, I'll admit, sometimes my own critical voice, too) asking all sorts of piercing questions about Paul's blithe assumptions about children's books.
