I read anywhere and everywhere, except in the bathroom, as I find this unspeakably vulgar and disrespectful to the person whose work one is reading, unless one is reading someone appalling, he informs us after an in-depth discussion about the situations and places in which reading is acceptable (all of them, including at work and during opera performances, and probably weddings). Like most obsessive readers, Queenan has developed very careful ways of dealing in and with books, and those who have mired themselves in the world of literature and have no intention, ever, of coming back out again will find it both hilariously and painfully familiar. The life of the reader'is desperately, inexplicably idiosyncratic, contradictory and bizarre, and in One for the Books'Queenan works through not just his reading history, but also his own individual reading compulsions, aversions and habits, each one of which the reader will either nod along with or declaim as guffbecause applicable or not to our own particular ways of reading, all of this stuff is familiar.

This is not a bubble-bath book sudsing about in the nostalgia of the literary engagements of childhood, or of the oft-described vanilla scent of an ageing tome, or of the inimitable lure of the first edition.'Its a drunken uncle at a wedding book: sometimes scabrous, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes insightful, and sometimes uncomfortable because of all the ways that it reminds you of yourself. Queenan shares the same ambivalence about the wider literary sphere and engages, as I invariably feel as though I do, in the life-long double-think experiment that is inevitably part of the life of the reader. Whichever publisher came up with the deliciously recursive idea of the book about books is either a most magnanimous sort, or one who is the cruel, but endlessly amused, opposite.Īs someone who reads about as prolifically, if not quite as polemically, as Joe Queenanat a rate of some two-hundredish books a yearyou can bet that I found myself fairly eerily profiled in' One for the Books, although in the form of the vituperative old grump I, although not quite there yet, quite believe I will become. If books are an escapist tool, then surely books about books are a tool of solidarity: heres an opportunity for the most tragic of individuals, those who read about life rather than actually living it, to see that vicariously lived life lived out in book form.

Closing Time by Joe Queenan