Review: My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues by Pamela Paul
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book, but not the last chapter and the epilogue. They were disappointing. Overall, the book is very good.

Here are two sections I particularly liked. First this one.

Some people are perfectly content with the mere reading of books. They take them out of the library, they borrow them from friends, they give them away with little expectation or even desire to see them returned. They download them onto devices where they exist in some experimental electronic format never to be carefully stowed in a specific slot on a physical bookshelf or left to beckon from a nightstand or artfully piled on top of a coffee table. For these people, it's all about content. I envy their focus and their discipline.

Because there is another sort, the kind who gets all caught up in the rest of the book -- even when it's not read. My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.

We in this latter group like to own books, and, with our constant demands and high expectations, we're the worst -- preferring some editions over others, having firm points of view on printings and cover designs. We're particular, and we're greedy. We want an unreasonable number of books and we don't like to throw them away. Some of us develop an almost hoardish fear around letting go of a book, even after its been read and reread. Throwing away or lending a book to an unreliable reader inevitably leads to regret. It is lovely to share books, but they need to come home. I have know people to maintain years-long grudges over unreturned books. Who can blame them? ...

Obviously, I want the books that I intend to read, but I also want the ones that I don't intend to read but think someone else I know might. Some books I may want to check back in one occasionally and I worry when they can't be found. Some books I need to have around "just in case." Just in case my daughter has to do a school project on French colonialism. Just in case one of my sons finally shows an interest in dinosaurs. Just in case one day I go to Ireland and need to consult the Irish classics. Or decide it;s time to read Gilgamesh, or need a last minute emergency gift.

And I also particularly liked this section:

It's no secret that we judge people by their books. This isn't a matter of snobbery -- at least not always -- but of taste and afffinity and sensibility. Frankly, someone who reads only Middle English poetry and literature in translation would probably put me off as much as someone whose tasts run exclusively to westerns or historical romance. What someone reads gives you a sense of who they are. If you really don't like someone's books, chances are you probably won't like them either.

Here's my personal test case: The Fountainhead. I have a hard time liking someone who loves it. Maybe if you admire Ayn Rand's philosophy and her politics but admit the book is terribly written. Or if you hate Ayn Rand's politics but helplessly fell for the story, or if it piqued your interest in architecture at an impressionable moment. But if The Fountainhead is one of your top five books ever, if you think a magnificent opus of our times, a book every president -- every citizen, at least those who matter! -- should read, then you will probably not be my best friend.

And people judge me by my own books, for better and for worse. ... That you might notalways agree with everything you read, and isn't that the point of reading, anyway? We can misjudge each other by our book titles, too.

One other thing I liked about the book. Paul found herself drawn to children's books, even before she had children. She eventually became the children's review editor at the New York TImes. Her children looked forward to seeing what books she would bring home. When she was offered the job of editor of books -- all books, not just children -- at the New York Times, her children thought this was a demotion since she stopped bringing middle grade books home every week,


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