'Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books,' by Wendy Lesser

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Why I Read

The Serious Pleasure of Books

By Wendy Lesser

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 223 pages; $25)

I began Wendy Lesser's "Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books" with my usual yellow highlighter in hand, notepaper and pen at the ready, opening the reviewer's copy as I would for any normal assignment. By the time I'd finished, the notepaper was still mostly blank, but the thing in my hand resembled a

brightly painted fan - every page saturated in color, with so many corners folded down the book had trouble staying closed.

That's exactly the kind of enmeshment Lesser hopes to ignite, I think, as she escorts us on this journey of pure pleasure (for herself and for us), reflecting upon why and what she reads (and re-reads) - as well, in fact, as upon how she reads.

Lesser, a longtime Berkeley resident, founded and edits the elegant literary journal the Threepenny Review. Author of nine prior books and contributor to various prominent literary venues, hers has been a no-holds-barred, art-loving life, and her dedication to that quest irradiates "Why I Read."

Notable at once, in this quiet-but-rich series of reflections, is its lack of didacticism: "You will deplore some of the works I hold up as models in this book, and that is not only sensible, but inevitable." It's a modest but important disclaimer, unhooking readers from the need to align or quarrel with Lesser's taste, allowing us simply to enjoy - and be painlessly instructed by - her blissful addiction to the delights and rewards of reading. "I live in [the world] with, and through, literature. That, I suppose, is what I am hoping to transmit."

Also gratifying is Lesser's clean, straightforward language. Her sentences are carefully considered, carefully laid down. This is apt, since "I wouldn't love the longest of [the books I love] ... if they didn't sustain my interest at the level of the sentence." And even when she grapples with abstracts, her voice is measured and clear: "A word here about the idea of truth. I will invoke the notion often ... yet I will not be able to define it for you, except by example. ... I hope you will ... allow the process of truth-defining to be cumulative rather than absolute. As far as I know, that is the only way things can work in literature."

Setting herself a series of linked tasks to clarify and compare elements of the writing she loves, Lesser groups her thoughts under a handful of titles that function as both overarching auspices and hot-wiring: Character and Plot, Novelty, Authority, Grandeur and Intimacy are among these. "Every chapter title ... at least attempts to answer the question of why I read." Each chapter is lush with illustrative examples. The Russians (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) figure often, as do Henry James, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and innumerable, beloved others, across time and genres.

Here's Lesser on characters in James: "It is not just a matter of our knowing these people through their actions. That is how they come to know themselves." On Dickens: "Nobody in life is exactly like Uriah Heep, of course, but [many] share at least some of his irritating qualities. And such is Dickens's power that when I meet these Heepish people, I can somehow imagine them rubbing their clammy hands together and calling themselves 'umble.' " Of Proust: "[His work] is an Elsewhere made accessible to you through the efforts of another imagination, collaborating for a time with your own."

A reviewer longs to quote from every page. Cervantes "is not the only novelist who can call our attention to the book in our hands and still make it live for us, but he is the best of them." And as for D. H. Lawrence's seminal novel, "Sons and Lovers," "I would stake my life on its truths ... I have staked my life on them, at key moments."

It will please many to see Lesser spend serious time examining mysteries (which she consumes as regularly as food) and science fiction, both of which have suffered literary devaluation elsewhere: "Part of the pleasure of reading old science fiction is [that] with the special powers vested in you by historical hindsight, you can compare the playfully visionary forecasts with what actually took place." (Lesser's father worked for IBM in Palo Alto, helping invent the "great-great-great-grandfather of Macs and PCs.")

And following an afterword called "The Book as Physical Object" - no harangue against devices; she also reads on her iPhone and iPad - Lesser offers "A Hundred Books to Read for Pleasure," reminding us comfortingly that "Reading is not about progressing toward a finish line, any more than life is."

The point, she suggests, is "to make a stab at it."

"All I ask of life," declared the late, revered author William Maxwell, "is the privilege of being able to read." His words might have supplied one of this excellent volume's epigraphs.