bookcrazylady45's review
3.0
Most of the writers in this book, I have not read. Though interesting to read their take on reading and what they read, I found I had nothing in common with most of them. I hadn't read their books and hadn't read any of the books they had read. No meeting of minds here. As for the book itself, there was a lot of repetition, outtakes from each interview repeated between interviews which padded the book and added nothing to it...I do not need to reread something within minutes of having read it. I read her first book and it was fabulous and I have already re-read it within six months and will likely read it again. I buy a lot of books about readers and how they feel about books. Maybe the problem is...this is a book about writers and what they read. I am not a writer. On the other hand, for this book I read on my Kindle I used the note taking feature to save stuff I liked ...so there was some stuff I liked very much...like raisins in rice pudding.
emkoshka's review
3.0
This book made me wonder if it's possible to vomit and yawn at the same time as I increasingly felt like doing both as the book progressed. I really like the concept of a column featuring a different writer talking about their reading predilections each week; I wish there was something similar in a major Australian newspaper. But this was so damn boring! Every writer was a rehash of the one before and after, to the extent that I formed a view very quickly that the American literary scene is incredibly insular (well, that reflects America in general, doesn't it), incestuous (everyone's reading and gushing over each other's books) and incapable of recommending anything remotely interesting for non-Americans to read. We don't care about your presidential or political histories or the Great American Novel written by, for and about dead white men. Yawn. And it was a bit of a sausage fest. Vomit. The only good thing that I got from the collection was a list of questions to guide reflections on my own reading, which seems far less driven by keeping up with the boring literati and more concerned with reading anything and everything, guilt-free.
nabilah's review
1.0
It is just too white and boring. All the boring white writers they could get were on this. It is a yawn inducer. Best kept on the bedside for nights you cannot sleep.
hayleyshortcake's review
3.0
I'm not very good at dipping in and out of books so I tend to read everything in big chunks,which made this book become repetitive towards the end.Still enjoyable overall though and I picked up some recommendations.
leto's review
5.0
I won this through a Goodreads giveaway and I love this book. I'm so happy that I won this book because it is exactly the type of book that I would see in the store and want but probably wouldn't buy. The interviews are funny and insightful. It was wonderful to learn more about people that I already knew and a good starting off point for people I had never heard of and now am interested to find out more about.
pivic's review
2.0
We all want to know what other people are reading. We peer at strangers’ book covers on an airplane and lean over their e-books on the subway. We squint at the iPhone of the person standing in front of us in the elevator. We scan bestseller lists and customer reviews and online social reading sites. Asking someone what she’s read lately is an easy conversational gambit—and the answer is almost bound to be more interesting than the weather. It also serves an actual purpose: we may find out about something we want to read ourselves. When I launched By the Book in The New York Times Book Review, it was an effort to satisfy my own genuine, insatiable desire to know what others—smart people, well-read people, people who are good writers themselves—were reading in their spare time. The idea was to stimulate a conversation over books, but one that took place at a more exalted level than the average watercooler chat. That meant starting big, and for me that meant David Sedaris. Who wouldn’t want to know which books he thinks are funny? Or touching or sad or just plain good?
Short questions, often the same, posed to a slew of mostly white male authors? Well, the answers were interesting, mainly when the answers were embarrassing and funny, but it mostly depended on the interviewee.
Many writers confess here to unorthodox indulgences (Hilary Mantel adores self-help books) and “failures” of personal taste (neither Richard Ford nor Ian McEwan has much patience for Ulysses).
A few years ago, I got on the plane and smiled to see a woman deeply engrossed in one of my books. I settled myself and a few minutes later glanced back. She was in a dead sleep.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate. —Ira Glass
Most celebrities who aren't authors here, e.g. Colin Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger, aren't really that interesting to me; Powell sounds like a complete stereotype, but others, like Lena Dunham, are interesting. And where the ladies are concerned, the older, the funnier they are.
I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he’d never seen The Big Lebowski. Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone. —Malcolm Gladwell
Q: When and where do you like to read? A: Reading is still my favorite pastime. It kicks writing’s butt. You learn so much more from reading than you do from writing, although writing pays slightly more. I start reading at four p.m. and continue way into cocktail hour, which begins at four thirty.
All in all, this tome should have contained more breadth of people, and not so much filler. It all became quite repetitive after a while, mainly because most people that were included here had the same kind of background (and foreground), I'm guessing. Still, fun at times, and drab others.
gossamerchild's review
3.0
Gee, who knew famous authors could be as snobby about genre fiction as the rest of us? I must admit it was frustrating to read the different variations of "I read everything. Except Science Fiction." Otherwise I enjoyed this quite a lot. It's a peak at some of my favorite authors without dipping into the TMI arena.