Quick Review

Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books by Leah Price

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is some lovely book porn: interesting little interviews with writers, ending in an illustrated list of favorites, followed by a few gorgeous pages of pictures of the writers' bookshelves. What for the bibliophile is there not to like about that?

The book is a well made object with bright pretty covers and bright pretty content, in a compact and clean design and at a reasonable price. Really, very well done.

The writers selected by the editor are an interesting crew, including more than one couple, which is specially interesting when studying what may be their individual or combined bookshelves. Some of the represented writers I might know or like better than others, but, as this book proves, everyone is at least as interesting as their bookshelves, and these are packed with lovely and sometimes surprising things:Claire Messud & James Wood (one of the couples) have a set of Hazlitt in 11 volumes, which I would probably knock them both to the ground just to get at, but also just that wonderful, weird business of unlikely alphabetical accidents; like the shelf of Lev Grossman & Sophie Gee that runs C. S. Lewis to Wyndham Lewis to Lermontov -- there's an unlikely imaginary dinner party conversation, no?

This is just then the sort of book about books that as soon as it's inevitably remaindered, I am going to own.



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