“Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading itself was a passion.”
Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction
Book Jacket Synopsis: “Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for twenty-eight years – carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand and from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully moved from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk. It is reliable if frayed, anonymous looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul’s Book of Books, a journal that records every book she’s ever read, from Sweet Valley High to Anna Karenina, from Catch-22 to Swimming to Cambodia. It recounts a journey in reading that reflects her inner life – her fantasies and hopes, her mistakes and missteps, her dreams and her ideas, both half-baked and wholehearted. Her life, in turn, influences the books she chooses, whether for solace or escape, information or sheer entertainment. But My Life with Bob isn’t really about those books. It’s about the deep and powerful relationship between book and reader. It’s about the way books provide each of us the perspective, courage, companionship, and imperfect self-knowledge to forge our own path. It’s about why we read what we read and how those choices make us who we are. It’s about how we make our own stories.”
Review: As evidenced by this blog, I’m an avid reader. Given a certain kinship I feel with other avid readers, I expected to love My Life with Bob: a book about books written by the editor of the New York Time Times Book Review, Pamela Paul. However, I found that Paul’s self-characterization led me to become increasingly frustrated and annoyed with her, which ultimately led to a lower book rating than I initially expected. On a positive note, I’ve rarely read a book that so accurately captures what it’s like to be an obsessive book nerd. It’s clear that Paul and I are cut from the same cloth, at least when it comes to our feelings about books. She was able to eloquently describe the reader/book relationship in a strikingly accurate way.
“Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.”
I too have tracked my reading habits throughout my life, largely in the form of favorite quotes scribbled down in random notebooks. It wasn’t until just over a year ago that I decided to formalize my literary tracking and start an actual journal for book quotes. Since then, I’ve recorded every book I’ve read with at least one quote. In a similar vein, this blog has also become a book of books, and I certainly agree with Paul that these books of books are our enduring way of recording our lives without actually including the oftentimes humiliating details.
“Bob has lasted a lot longer than any of my abandoned teenage journals – I write in it still – and here’s why: diaries contain all kinds of things I wanted to forget – unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends and angsting over college admissions. Bob contains things I want to remember: what I was reading when all that happened.”
But I did find major issues with My Life with Bob, largely because I didn’t like Paul’s self-characterization. My annoyance began about halfway through the book and spawned into an established dislike by the time I finished. I constantly felt like Paul tried to pretend that she didn’t have a privileged adolescence and adulthood, when all evidence stood to the contrary. When she graduated from college, her dad gifted her a Eurail pass to explore Europe, which she lost. Calling her dad to “self-flagellate and grovel and beg for another,” he answered the phone and said “I thought you were calling to wish me a happy birthday. It was yesterday.” Her father also funded her trip to China, asking for only one thing in return: that she bring him back a spittoon. She didn’t. While visiting and working in Paris (which she did over a dozen times while growing up), she refused to speak English to American tourists, pretending to be a haughty Parisian instead. If I had to characterize Paul (at least adolescent Paul) in three words based on this novel, I would say privileged, narcissistic, and selfish. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but the last straw came on page 164, when she wrote about judging people based on the books they read. Her personal “test case” is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and she “has a hard time liking someone who loves it.” She goes on to say the following:
“I certainly wouldn’t want to be judged by The Fountainhead, which shows up in Bob, but which I read in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a class on twentieth-century architecture.”
After finishing it, Paul threw the book into the trash, where “it would never hurt anyone again.” I read The Fountainhead as a senior in high school and really enjoyed it. It was the first time I became attached to a physical copy of a book; sadly, I dutifully returned it to the high school library once finished. I think all of this means that if Paul and I met in real life, I might not like her and she might not like me. But that’s okay. Something tells me we would respect each other as readers anyways.
Rating:
