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Reading

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Sure we think we are the best book review around when it comes to religion and philosophy and select titles in general trade, but we also rely upon our competitors to keep us informed of good reads. THE READER’S CATALOG is a gem of a resource for general readers. They really do select some of the best books around, so we advise you to check them out for your reading needs.

THE READER’S CATALOG

Second Edition

An Annotated Selection of More than 40,000 of the Best Books in Print in Over 300 Categories

edited by Geoffrey O’Brien

Reader’s Catalog, 230 West Fifty-Seventh Street, New York, NY 10107, phone: 212-262-7198

$34.95, 1968 pages, extensively annotated, indexed, illustrated, lists, cartoons.

0-924322-01-2

 

For online version of this useful resource: WWW.NYBOOKS.COM

This fine bulky, newsprint catalog offers a exceptional list of fine, reasonably priced books with short comments on most titles. Looking over the areas of our own expertise we concur that this catalog is an essential resource for reader’s who want to explore new areas of knowledge. This catalog is a good place to start.

Established in 1989 by Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House, and the poet, author, and editor Geoffrey O’Brien, The Reader’s Catalog is an annotated listing of the 40,000 best books in print in America. As such, it aims to embody Matthew Arnold’s famous ideal in a unique hybrid of the perfect bookstore, in which nothing ever goes out of stock, and the perfect reference book, in which an easy-to-use, thematic organization makes titles readily accessible.

Over 300 categories—often introduced with informative text—provide the book’s basic organization, while many of the individual books listed have been supplied with concise, descriptive annotations. The Reader’s Catalog provides basic knowledge in a wealth of different areas, making it not only an essential work of reference but a pleasure to read in its own right.

Four years ago, the First Edition of The Reader’s Catalog sold out the last of its 150,000 copies. They have, however, continued to distill in biannual updates the enormous variety of books published each season, bringing discriminating selections of the best new books in every field of human knowledge to readers around the world, and offering them a simple way to order books from America, at American prices.

Over half of the entries are new, and the book as a whole has been entirely recast in a distinctive, user-friendly format designed by Richard Saul Wurman, organizer of the TED Conference and prize-winning designer of information-intensive books. The book is organized around a simple tab system and includes extensive indexes as well as illustrations by the renowned caricaturist, David Levine. It also features new and updated annotations as well as over 35 original and imaginative timelines and maps that introduce subjects and historical eras in a bold and intriguing graphic format. Once again, The Reader’s Catalog has found a new and unusual way to explore the world of books.

While the most exacting efforts have been made to ensure full accuracy at the time of publication, they cannot guarantee that all the books they have listed will continue to be in print and available. A printed catalog is subject to the inevitable limitations of the publishing industry: tens of thousands of books are published each year in America, and once published, they don’t sit still. Prices increase, titles are delayed, stock sells out. Books fall out of print, others come back in paperback; publishers go out of business, others set up shop. Some titles are published by tiny presses without distributors; others by massive conglomerates with Byzantine warehouses.

Updated through 1997, this edition contains 50 percent new material, arranged in a user-friendly, highly readable format, and covers information in such fields as World History, World Literature, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Spiritualty, Eastern Philosophy, Cooking, Film, and Current Fiction. They do offer FREE biannual updates. and they maintain a user-friendly website at WWW.NYBOOKS.COM, where, over the coming half year, they keep an electronic version of the print catalogue. will make available the entire Reader’s Catalog. With cross-referencing, full Boolean searching, and simple ordering procedures, The Reader’s Catalog Online offers the unique editorial qualities of the Second Edition and links them to the bibliographic resources of the World Wide Web.

WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS RESOURCE TO OUR AVID READERS.

RUINED BY READING: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Beacon Press) 0-8070-7083-1  

This delightful rumination upon the joys of reading highlighted with humor and buttressed by wit and serious thought. It should become a highly regarded essay upon the shy art: Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat.… Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first.… Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no budging you.… Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

We gaze at marks on a page, put there by a machine, recognizable as words. Each one denotes something discrete but we do not, cannot, read them as such, except in the first days of learning how. They offer themselves in groups with wholes greater than the sum of the parts. As in human groups, the individual members behave in relation to their companions: each word presents aspects of itself suited to the ambiance, amplifying some connotations and muting others. Their respective rankings must change too. A word will be key here, play a supporting role there, and in each successive appearance will be weightier and more richly nuanced. All this we register faster than the speed of the light illuminating our page, hardly aware of noting the valence, assessing the role and position, of each word as it flies by, granting it its place in the assemblage.

Still more remarkable, these inky marks generate emotion, even give the illusion of containing emotion, while it is we who contribute the emotion. Yet it was there in advance too, in the writer. What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Semioticists have unraveled these miracles in detail; even to call them miracles sounds ingenuous. After all, most aesthetic experience rests on transference through an inanimate medium. What is painting but oils smeared on canvas, or chamber music but bows drawn across strings? Reading is not the same, though. There is no sense organ that words fit like a glove, as pictures fit the eye or music the ear. Intricate neural transactions take place before words find their elusive target, before the wraith we call the "writer" finds the reader.

For dwelling in the book, however remote in time and space, is this imaginary being, this missing link whom no reader has ever glimpsed. Yes, from the visits of Dickens and Wilde to today’s performances, readers flock to see writers, to meet the person who has given them pleasure; perhaps the right of existence, but never in the flesh of the person bearing her name.

Since the book, too, doesn’t possess an independent or sensory existence but must teased, opened and fathomed, we enjoy the heady power of being necessary to its life. The real book is the prince hidden inside the frog. We open it, and our eyes give the kiss of regeneration. This power is what intoxicates. The thinking of others does not interfere with our own free thinking, but meshes with it in a splendid rite of recovery.

If we make books happen, they make us happen as well. Reading teaches receptivity, Keats’s negative capability. It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan. The speaker lends herself and we do the same, a mutual and ephemeral exchange, like love. Yet unlike love, reading is a pure activity. It will gain us nothing but enchantment of the heart. And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily, also enchanting the heart.

Reading gives a context for experience, a myriad of contexts. Not that we will know any better what to do when the time comes, but we will not be taken unawares or in a void. When we are old and have everything stripped away, and grasp the vanity of having had it and of grieving for its loss, yet remain bound in both vanity and grief, hugging the whole rotten package to our hearts in an antic, fierce embrace, we may think, King Lear: this has happened before, I am not in uncharted territory, now is my turn in the great procession.

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