BOOK BY BOOK: NOTES ON READING AND LIFE
Book ID/图书代码： 14650006B04418
English Summary/英文概要： While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation--between the author and the reader, or between two readers--to bring them fully to life. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word informs and enriches nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.
Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda’s capacious love for and understanding of books. Favoring showing as much as telling, Dirda draws us deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to how we might better understand our lives.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 為什麼書是人生最好的導師？不一定要看暢銷作家，但一定要看經典作品，不一定要讀很多書，寧可多花時間，品味讓你有共鳴的書。德瑞達將告訴你，秀才不出門，如何知天下事，如何透過書本體會人生。
Awards/获奖情况："As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."---Chicago Tribune (Editor’s Choice) Dirda, a distinguished book critic at the Washington Post Book World, continues his campaign to educate readers. In his fourth book, this well-read, well-intentioned generalist presents a commonplace collection of excerpts from admired works gathered under topical headings. Dirda’s selections are enticing, and he writes knowledgeably about diverse literary matters, but his commonplaces are in the self--improvement mode and are based on his belief that one learns invaluable lessons about life from reading. Aligning himself with such advocates of tolerance and reason as Thoreau and Isaiah Berlin, Dirda offers reflections on work and leisure, love and death. He also provides useful must-read lists fashioned in the great books tradition and spanning the literary universe from Cicero to Dr. Seuss. But when he offers advice on dental care and exercise, he loses his way. Dirda means to be philosophical in his coverage of body and soul, and some readers will appreciate his self-help approach, but this is a prescriptive catchall that dilutes Dirda’s literary acumen and turns literature into something small, like a pill.---Donna Seaman, From Booklist
Longtime Washington Post Book World staff writer and Pulitzer-winning critic Dirda writes a guide to reading and its life lessons ranging widely and pithily through the universal themes of learning, school, work, love, childhood and spiritual guidance. Dirda’s message is simple: if reading is to be life enhancing, we need to focus our attention on books that are rewarding. Dirda encourages readers to forge a subjective and intimate relationship with books. He urges readers to spend less time on brand-name authors and more time discovering the books that truly excite them, paying attention to works from the past, including the classics. With humor and pragmatism, Dirda sets forth advice for building a hypothetical guest-room library: "Ideally items should be family, cozy, browsable, above all soothing" (and include a Jane Austen novel). Throughout are eclectic snippets of writing gleaned from a lifetime’s reading; Dirda draws on a notebook in which he has recorded striking quotations and passages, and his volume has the agreeable feeling of a commonplace book . Highly cultured yet never pretentious, Dirda’s survey convincingly demonstrates what a wealth of life lessons—moral, emotional and aesthetic—a good library can contain. For those who enjoy books about reading, and for all those seeking to encourage others to read, Dirda’s brief yet suggestive book will inspire. (May 5) ---From Publishers Weekly
About the Author/作者介绍： Michael Dirda, a longtime staff writer for The Washington Post Book World, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A popular lecturer and commencement speaker, he lives with his family in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Michael Dirda麥克 德瑞達1993年Pulitzer Prize for criticism得主The Washington Post Book World擔任編輯和作者超過20年知名美國評論家，善長文學，歷史，科幻小說，科學小說，驚悚，詩集，傳記，童書 華盛頓郵報評論版的專欄作家康乃爾大學博士學位
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