Sometimes, I just don’t understand blurbs, although I’ll admit the one from George Saunders did make me more interested in Shannon Reed’s Why We Read. He said, “A hilarious and incisive exploration of the joys of reading.” While I found the book interesting, the funniest part of the book was the subtitle, “On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out”. Hilarious? I don’t think so.

There were many points in Reed’s book that I identify with. She defines herself as a reader, saying “Reading gives me the world.” At fourteen, she was invited to join the “elite teenage page program” at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I started as a page at sixteen. And, she says she’s had a love of libraries over the years.

Oh, I know this feeling of being a reader as a kid. It’s not often that I experience it now. “It was a time of unfettered, unhinged reading, of passing every moment in two lives, one my actual lived existence, and the other wherever my book took me. I miss it.” I do, too. She talks about that in her chapter “To Finish a Series”. Were you obsessed with series as a kid? I can’t tell you how many Oz books I read, how many Happy Hollister mysteries. I didn’t read the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books as the author says she did. I don’t think those books had enough adventure for me. I preferred mysteries even as a child, or Andrew Lang’s numerous Fairy Books, which were often dark and grim. Don’t think of The Yellow Fairy Book as something sweet.

In that same chapter, Reed mentions her students. “Luxuriating in a series is still a pleasure. My college students have told me that they read those fantasy series they love at a breakneck speed, plot-drunk, desperate to find out what happens aware that once finished, they can return to the beginning and start again.” Although I was an adult when the Harry Potter books came out, that’s how I read every one. And, I have nephews in their thirties who reread some of those enormous fantasy series.

No, I didn’t find Why We Read to be hilarious. But, there were passages that spoke to me, and sometimes, that’s all I can ask. Here’s one for all of us readers. “Read whatever you want, whenever you like, however you prefer, wherever you choose.” Yes.

Shannon Reed’s website is https://www.shannonreed.org/

Why We Read by Shannon Reed. Hanover Square Press, 2024. ISBN 9781335007964 (hardcover), 336p.


FTC Full Disclosure – The publicist sent an ARC, with no promise of a positive review.