I didn’t expect that a book about reading would be this laugh‑out‑loud funny and thought provoking all at the same time. Why We Read is a collection of essays on topics that range from the author’s own experiences as a reader and a creative writing instructor to the reasons, as it says in the title, why we read. Those reasons include: ‘Because We Had To' (assigned reading), 'Because I Wanted Free Pizza' (Pizza Hut's Book It! program), ‘For Comfort’, ‘To Be Shocked’, 'To Shake up Your Perspective', ‘Because it’s Fun’, and many more. The essays flow smoothly from one to the next although they don't need to be read in any particular order and a number of them are good enough to read more than once. ( )

purposeful book if a bit corny at times - glad to read it ( )

I received an ARC of this book for free from the publisher for promotional purposes.

What a wonderful collection of essays on reading!

This book is a collection of personal essays on the impact of books and reading on the author’s life. As a lifelong reader myself, I found many of the essays relatable. One of my favorites was “To Break The Rules” (pg. 65) which discusses how there is no right way to be a “Good Reader.” We should read how and what we want. I wholeheartedly agree!

The book is well organized. It is organized in rough chronological order of the author’s life, which made the essays flow logically. The earlier essays focused on her childhood, while the later ones focused on her teaching career. There are also short and humorous list-like essays (for example, “Calmed-Down Classics of American Literature for the Anxiety-Ridden” and “Signs You May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction”) dispersed throughout which helped break up the monotony of essays.

The author’s writing style is easy, accessible, and often humorous. Despite talking a lot about teaching, it’s never pretentious or overly academic.

My one critique is that some of the essays started losing steam at the end. I found some of the later essays not as impactful as the earlier ones.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to all my fellow bookworms! ( )

A memoir about books and reading. Like a warm hug of reflections on and insights into reading (and teaching reading/literature). Exactly the kind of book I like to read every once in a while--affirming rather than challenging and providing a lot of chances to nod along in recognition. ( )

George Saunders, a writer I admire (full disclosure: I am a paid subscriber to his online Story Club), recently posted a prepublication chapter from this forthcoming book of essays, in which writing teacher Reed describes the experience of teaching Saunders’s eccentric, imaginative novel Lincoln in the Bardo with her students at the University of Pittsburgh. Reed does a brave thing: she does not read and analyze the book beforehand: she reads it, chapter by chapter, from scratch, alongside her students. Together, they all try to figure out what this crazy book is about. The creativity, perseverance, openness, and sheer fun of the adventure is disarming and entertaining. I love books about books, about readers and reading, and this one looked promising; NetGalley kindly obliged me with an advance copy.

It quickly became apparent that the title is a misnomer: it should be titled “Why I Read.” Not that we don’t have things in common, and not that her various explications of why people spend hours absorbing printed text aren’t valid (“Because We Had To,” “Because I Wanted a Free Pizza,” “To Feel Less Alone,” “To Feel Superior,” “For Comfort”). But Shannon Reed is the focus in chapter after chapter: her focus is her reading, her choices, her experiences. This is not “On Bookworms,” but “On A Bookworm.” So readers should expect an idiosyncratic, personal memoir of her own reading habits and preferences. That said, I found her sections on her teaching and her students to be the most engaging – the comradely exploration of Saunders, the unexpected joy her tenth-grade girls found in Jane Eyre, how her not-very-diverse classroom coped with an essay about a Black man’s experience of being perceived as a threat. One of the more successful personal pieces worked through how Atul Gawande’s sensitive and powerful book Being Mortal affected her in the aftermath of her father’s death – and was one of the few written with a more serious, heartfelt, and honest emotional tone.

Because – and your mileage may and almost certainly will vary – Reed is considered (and considers herself, and tells us this several times) a humor writer. She clearly works very hard at it. And sometimes when you work that hard at it, it’s not funny. It’s labored and heavy-handed. I found the numerous “footnotes” which were basically cute or smart-alecky asides tedious. Not sure if they were intended to be a satire on scholarship, but they weren’t particularly sharp – more like what a snarky teenager would mutter in the back row of a boring class, thinking how clever she is. Sometimes my impatience was just a matter of taste: she boasts on never having read a book I love, and champions a series I gagged on (yes, Anne of Green Gables…). One of my measures of a book about books is whether it gives me a title or two that I need to go find and soon. This one, I’m afraid, did not.

People who read, who love to read, who couldn’t live without reading, will certainly find plenty of head nods, agreement, and things to appreciate in Reed’s equal devotion to the power and joy of books. She may be a very good teacher, who respects and enjoys her students and sharing their journeys through stories and characters and words. Had her focus stayed more on things other than Shannon Reed’s eccentricities (a terror of sea creatures?) and proclivities (a very long wander through the writing of cookbooks) and inclination toward smart remarks, this might have been a much more affecting and absorbing book than it is.

And I would like to tell her that if Gawande touched her, she needs to read Middlemarch (well, except for Will Ladislaw, who really is irritating). ( )