This is another book that I will recommmend unreservedly, at least to people who think of themselves as readers: go out and get it and read it, and if you're going to do that you hardly need bother with the rest of this review. But of course some of you may not trust me yet, and may want some evidence.

In talking about the odd fact that it's possible to be bored by a book on a subject you like, but fascinated by a book on a subject that bores you, Schwartz paraphrases Adam Zagajewski, noting that the reader may be looking "not for an appealing subject but for the affinity of a congenial mind." This book is, happily, both: an astonishingly congenial mind, a voice like your most treasured and intelligent friend from college, and a subject dear to all true readers: reading.

For a really avid reader, or at least for me, this book feels like (well, perhaps a rather milder version of) the coming-out of a famous actor or sports star might have felt to a closeted gay, back when such things were rare. Schwartz is a successful fiction writer, who has (of course) been reading all her life. In "Ruined by Reading", in the process of a very thoughtful and entertaining discussion of how reading has fit into her life (or how her life has been fit around her reading), she admits (for instance) that she doesn't really remember much of what she reads. That she makes long earnest lists of books that she ought to read, and then doesn't read most of them. That she enjoys reading while eating. That, as she's grown up, she's begun to be more sanguine about putting a book aside unfinished, although it still pains her. And so wonderfully on. So it's not just me! These are not in fact signs of unworthiness. It was a great relief.

The book is not utterly perfect. Once or twice she somewhat ruins a point by making it too explicitly. She has the bizarre notion that every significant modern writer (except perhaps for the geniuses) must be aware of the work of every other significant modern writer. Well, actually the book *is* utterly perfect: that treasured intelligent college friend wouldn't be nearly so charming a fireside companion if you could just nod and agree with *everything* she said.

I could go on, but I will try not to. This is an immensely charming and erudite book, well thought-out and at the same time unusually spontaneous. For instance, Schwartz begins a section by setting out to explain to us why it's a bad idea to see the film adaptations of great books, and ends by concluding that it's probably not really a bad idea at all, and her own reluctance to do it is probably irrational. It is great fun to watch. A privilege, really, to see the author thinking about herself, about reading, about other readers, about how she is like us, how we are like her. One of the most satisfying things, I think, is to watch an admirable mind thinking about, well, about *me*!

Highly recommended.

%A Schwartz, Lynne Sharon
%T Ruined by Reading
%I Beacon Press
%C Boston
%D 1996
%G ISBN 0-8070-7083-1
%P 119 pp.
%O trade paper, US$10.00