a place to read life and books

by Michael Cohen

In this essay collection, Michael Cohen tells us about his surprise encounter with the remains of Frida Kahlo, about his father’s murder, and about his son’s close shave with death on the highway. His subjects can be as commonplace as golfing with close friends, amateur astronomy, birding, or learning to fly at the age of sixty. But he asks difficult questions about how we are grounded in space and time, how we are affected by our names, how a healthy person can turn into a hypochondriac, and how we might commune with the dead. And throughout he measures, compares and interprets his experiences through the lens of six decades of reading. The tools of the writer’s trade fascinate him as do eateries in his small college town, male dress habits, American roads, and roadside shrines. He lives on the Blood River in Kentucky when he is not in the Tucson Mountains.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[E.A. Allen]

There are books about books and even books about readers, but there are few books about reading. Michael Cohen has filled that void wonderfully, with a book of essays that in one way or another, tell about a life of reading.

Cohen’s life as essayist, professor, and keen observer of ordinary things and people are the substance of these essays, but in one way or another, each brings the reader back to the special joys of a life of loving books and reading. Each in its own way comments on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is at once refined and erudite. And yet, there is nothing stilted about these essays.

Every reader will come away with favorite essays from this collection – three stood out for me, mainly because they touched a personal nerve or two. What I liked most about the essays in general was how Michael Cohen artfully — or maybe just naturally -- integrates life with books and books with life. Everywhere, for him, there is the synapse between experience and books read.

Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. They are simple and direct—amusing, highly personal, and insightful. They’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore. I promise. E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries Series.

[Ken Burkhalter]

On the one hand, it feels like I was reading my own life in that there are so many shared interests. On the other hand, it is rare that one reads someone for whom the art of writing seems to come so naturally. I have not read many essay collections; this one will have me coming back for more.

Cohen, in the middle of his seventh decade as he wrote this, is a retired professor of literature. It shows. That he is writing from his own life and experiences, its joys and sometime pain, makes it even more compelling despite its late-afternoon-conversation-in-the-corner-of-the-parlor atmosphere.

Our shared touchpoints are many. Flying, Arizona, reading, writing, fountain pens, notebooks, astronomy, love of mysteries, and on and on. With each subject we learn not just of his interest but a bit of the history of the topic and its importance to him. I am a fan of fountain pens and have a small collection, but I learned from Michael Cohen how they came to be so popular through the ages and still today. His exposition on notebooks is much the same, an abbreviated history of an everyday "thing," which now seems to have a life.

What always fascinates me about good writers is how easily they make routine moments seem important. It is a simple moment and then, suddenly as it seemingly sneaks up on you, there is a poignant realization or life lesson you instantly connect with. This volume is full of them.

Near the end he spends a fair amount of time relating with other writers, notably Proust and Montaigne. He compares his mastery of his craft as unfavorably to theirs as I do mine to his or anyone else who is actually a writer.

A friend recommended this book to me. He too is a writer, despite his many other pursuits. He is also a fan of essay literature. Thanks to his prompting and Cohen's mastery, I am now as well.

[Lauren Daniels]

Michael Cohen is a master of the great American essay. 'A Place to Read' is a silky flight into the wisdom of personal, as well as universally human, experience. From Odysseus to Milton, Bradbury to de Botton—Cohen’s sweeping and spacious reflections drew me into questions of being, mortality, and even the thrill of flight: “I wasn’t sad; I was exhilarated. I was going to learn to fly. I was sixty years old. What had taken me so long?” The pages cross the years and state lines, and for someone who knows something of his references to Odysseus yearning for Ithaca, the American settings held me—California, New Orleans, Kentucky, Arizona, Seattle, Missouri. Cohen writes, “The heart beats, as it should, in secret.” He does not walk with readers. He flies with them.

[David Reiter]

Michael Cohen’s essays on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader.

– Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review

Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in Michoacán, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.

– Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid


Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. Each is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite. Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore. I promise.

– E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries