Why read Selected writings 2001-2021

Two decades of essays and lectures on literature come together in this idiosyncratic volume from Self (Will). In answering the question posed by the title essay, which was published on the website Literary Hub in 2021, he writes "read because short of meeting and communing with them... reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding." Several pieces focus on the novel in the digital age: in "A Care Home for Novels," a 2014 lecture Self gave at Trinity College, Oxford, he muses that novels will continue to be read, though they'll be "an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music," and in "The Printed Word in Peril," published in Harper's in 2018, he admits his determination "not to rage against the dying of literature's light... but merely to examine the great technological discontinuity of our era." "The Last Typewriter Engineer," meanwhile, from the London Review of Books in 2014, is an ode to the man who services Self's typewriters, and to the machines themselves ("My stick-fingers produced satisfying percussive paradiddles, in between which came blissful fermatas"). Taken together, the candid musings are a fine mix of practicality and nostalgia. Self's fans will relish having these wide-ranging reflections in one place. (Jan.)

Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters. In this wide-ranging hodgepodge of pieces, Self reveals a more personable side--a kinder, gentler, more accessible one, even if the prose may send readers scurrying to the dictionary. On a single page from his astute essay on the "otherworldliness of Kafka's prose," he uses vermiculated, velleity, inanition, and neurasthenia. The titular essay examines the powerful experience of solitary reading, which provides "direct engagement with the mind shaping its language." Besides, quips the author, it's freeing to do so whenever we want. In the witty "What to Read?" Self urges us to "read what the hell you like," later adding, "No, read what you want--but be conscious that, in this area of life as so many others, you are what you eat, and if your diet is solely pulp, you'll very likely become rather…pulpy." There's also "How Should We Read?" while "Reading for Writers" neatly concludes the collection. In between, Self effortlessly weaves his way from such lighthearted topics as shelves, the "very lynchpins of a form of bourgeois domesticity," to a lengthy, dark, autobiographical piece on W.G. Sebald and the role of the Holocaust in his writing as well as an unfortunately timely piece about his visit to "coruscating" Pripyat, near Chernobyl, at the same time as the Fukushima disaster. In "A Care Home for Novels," Self argues that the literary novel is "dying before your eyes," while another essay, from Harper's in 2018, is titled "The Printed Word in Peril." Self also delivers an insightful piece on the "gonzo journalist avant la lettre," George Orwell; a fine appreciation of William S. Burroughs and his "fiendish parable of modern alienation," Junky; and a stellar exploration of Joseph Conrad's forward thinking regarding "space, time and their odd interlinkages" in The Secret Agent. Winding down, "Apocalypse Then" is an introspective, sobering piece on climate change. Plenty to ponder in this energetic, opinionated collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.