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A Life With Books (2012)

by Julian Barnes(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Jonathan Cape

review 1: This is not a book but rather a small pamphlet with Julian Barnes’s ruminations on his life with books as a book fetishist. It doesn’t take long to read, but no more room is needed here. It is like a distillation of thoughts on books; as someone wrote in here, it is like an espresso – lots of taste in a very small cup. The taste here is rich, as always with Julian Barnes, and heart-warming in a way that I suppose only other booklovers would be able to recognize. Two typical Barnes statements that I took away from this:“Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.”“When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.”
review 2: Novelist, essayist, Booker Prize winner and all around genius writer Julian Barnes pub... morelished this tiny essay for charity. I found out about it and was able to buy a copy from 'cross the pond.It's about what a little book weevil Barnes is, how he's been collecting since he was a very young man and all his trials and tribulations thereof and forthwith. It's adorable and darling finding out he's as book mad as all that, especially his admitting he looked through some of his older brother's books avidly, because there were nude drawings in the texts of Ancient Roman works!Julian Barnes?Yes, pets, Julian Barnes. "Over the next decade or so - from the late Sixties to the late Seventies - I became a furious book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate which far exceeded any possible reading speed."That sounds vaguely familiar... "I bought with a hunger which I recognise, looking back, was a kind of neediness: well, bibliomania is a known condition."Yes, yes it is!And on he goes, for 27 pages of pure bliss. If you live in the UK it's only £ 1.99. For us in the Colonies, unfortunately, all the king's taxes of course make it much higher - $ 7.00 or so, I seem to recall pp but don't quote me on that. Mayhaps we should dump a bit more tea in the harbor, lads...It's just such a joy. A complete and utter joy. Grab hold of one while you can. less

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