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Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008
by
John Leonard
Right up until his death in 2008, John Leonard was a lion in American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. He reviewed the most celebrated writers of his age—from Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion to Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon. He championed Morrison’s work soardently that she invited him to travel w...more
Hardcover, 400 pages
Published
March 15th 2012
by Viking Adult
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Based on Reading for My Life, an exhilarating selection of 50 John Leonard reviews, essays and speeches (culled from, by his own estimate, a five-million-word career), it's possible to believe the critic read every one of the 13,000 books Leonard once calculated, with a tinge of regret, were the most even a reader as avid as he might hope to consume in a lifetime. But his erudition on a dizzying array of subjects--flashing like fireworks in lists that sometimes stretch to 30 or more references--...more
If you are a person who enjoys reading extremely well-written essays, particularly those that take you through your own times as you read, you're going to like this book very much.
John Leonard has a style all his own, and when he's writing about politics and prominent figures from the 1950s until his death in 2008, I was amazed by his articulate and perceptive discussions. His book reviews track American literature through those years as well, and I found myself experiencing renewed interest in...more
John Leonard has a style all his own, and when he's writing about politics and prominent figures from the 1950s until his death in 2008, I was amazed by his articulate and perceptive discussions. His book reviews track American literature through those years as well, and I found myself experiencing renewed interest in...more
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I enjoyed reading this collection of reviews and essays by the late John Leonard. Leonard seems to have read everything by all the major (non British) novelists during the 50 years that this collection spans. As a great reader and lover of books, it was great to read the observations of another greater reader about many of the novelists I have read and enjoyed over the years. Leonard can also sling some sentences. If you like reading strong literary analysis of great writers then this si a book...more
“The public has a way of letting you know that it will pay more for you to discover and to celebrate excellence in other people, and rather less for your own refined feelings” (2).
“...so many novels, all of them reinventing the world in words” (3).
“But popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It's like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition i...more
“...so many novels, all of them reinventing the world in words” (3).
“But popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It's like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition i...more
The late author, a book reviewer for the NYT, and editor of the Times' Book Review, gives some wonderful profiles of Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, and Philip Roth. The essay "The Last Innocent White Man" profiles Kurt Vonnegut, of whom Leonard writes that "there isn't a person in this room who hasn't experienced a Kurt kindness, or been kissed with grace by something in one of his novels, or both."
John's son Andrew writes of his father "What self-respecting critic does not seize the chance to weave Hegel...more
John's son Andrew writes of his father "What self-respecting critic does not seize the chance to weave Hegel...more
It's difficult to convey how this book made me feel, ultimately, other than I wish I had been able to get to know him. His writing, his reviews were so ... I'm going to say "evocative," only because I can't think of any other word and all word choices seem inconsequential in light of such erudition and intelligence and warmth and fun and love.
Oddly, some of his reviews made me decide that I really didn't want to read the author or book he was reviewing. I know "100 Years of Solitude" is consider...more
Oddly, some of his reviews made me decide that I really didn't want to read the author or book he was reviewing. I know "100 Years of Solitude" is consider...more
My affection for Leonard, the former editor of the NYT Book Review and a CBS Sunday Morning contributor for more than a decade, knows few bounds. This collection of essays and reviews is a winner, mostly full of discussion of the things he loved (daring, lefty politics, humanism and Toni Morrison). I wanted to be John Leonard when I grew up. Now that he's gone (but sitting on the shelf waiting for me anytime I need him), I still do.
Jun 08, 2012
Doug
added it
I grew up with John Leonard. He showed me what a life of the mind might look like. As a kid in Indiana, a kid of parents who did not read, as a kid who had an odd hunger for books and ideas, John Leonard opened the world for me. Reading his essays and reviews is an opportunity to sit at the feet of the master. Long life the king.
May 04, 2012
Louis Profeta Profeta
marked it as to-read
Metaphors without limits requires a creative pen, this reviewer makes his own pictures like Spielburg does but his are like sqeezing a lemon in your face or singing a torch song of your merits.A tangy writer of the Ivy league.
May 13, 2012
Louis
is currently reading it
Very interesting in its Author and subject, Leonard is probably the best and most colorful in his descriptions, he loves reading and states when you love a book it loves you back"
If you love books, Kurt Vonnegut said, books will love you back. And that is exactly what will happen when John Leonard's "reading for my life" lands in your hands.
A friend of mine bequeathed me with a Kindle - and this book was one of the ones 'resident'. I feel it has filled in a huge gap in my education, or at least in my reading. Yeah, I think I read a John Leonard piece in the New Yorker once or perhaps twice. Or maybe years ago when he was writing for Playboy. But I had certainly never sat down and read his work in concentrated form. A terrific tour through the 60s. Great commentary on the music scene in the long piece on Dylan (who he didn't like ve...more
Whoa!....I wish I had this guys brain and have read and(and could remember) all the books he has read! Interesting reading....lots of factoids.
I read two of the last essays, on Yiddish Policeman's Union and Year of Magical Thinking, because those discussed books I have read. My library stack is enormous right now, and he has to wait.
only part way through, but it is exquisitely wrought... loving it, thus far!
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John Leonard grew up in Washington, D.C., Jackson Heights, Queens, and Long Beach, California, where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. Raised by a single mother, Ruth Smith, he made his way to Harvard University, where he immersed himself in the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, only to drop out in the spring of his sophomore year. He then attended the University of California at...more
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“It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.”
—
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