Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan

I picked up this book at Barnes and Noble on New Year's Day because the title was the story of my life. The first line of the book was also familiar: "It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book." so I bought it.

Corrigan is the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. I hadn't heard her on the radio before reading this book, although I have my ears open now. In this book, Corrigan weaves autobiographical pieces of her life with three genres of books: "female extreme adventures", detective novels, and secular Catholic martyr tales. She recommends several books (of these genres and others) throughout the narrative and provides an extensive booklist in the back. What I liked most about these recommendations was that she didn't have any shame in what she enjoyed, beach reading and classics alike.

This book inspired me to engage more with the books that I read. I envied the fact that she was able to place her life through books. For example, she discussed her preoccupation with detective novels immediately following 9/11. I might be able to figure out what I was reading then but I've never thought that much about the significance of it. I guess I've always viewed reading as something that I treated myself to, that nobody questioned my interest in (because reading is noble, right?), and thus something I didn't bother to assign significance to.

Reading Corrigan's book, however, I was struck by having lost the opportunity for introspection offered by deeper engagement with the books I so addictively read. The last time I felt this type of "book envy" was when a college roommate showed me a book list she had kept since childhood with titles in her book journal like, "Books read during the summer of 1990."

Recently I read Kim Chernin's The Hungry Self, although I left it out of the blog with a handful of other "body image books" because I thought they would seem repetitive. However, Chernin's book includes the following passage about reading:

"I find that there was a book, written by a woman, that helped me greatly during a difficult summer in my early twenties. As it happens, it was not a book about women and food. It did not come right out and tell me that an eating disorder was a serious form of identity crisis. But it scattered seeds, it turned my thinking in a particular direction, it set me dreaming and musing as I made my way through its pages. Reading it changed me in ways I would not then have been able to specify. But that is the way with reading. it gets in under the skin, and there, in darkness, it begins to prepare the work of fully conscious understanding. At the time, one reads and loses oneself in the reading and forgets to look up when the telephone rings, and one is transformed beyond one's wildest hopes and imaginings by this act of slipping into the aching silences of oneself, brought there by another woman's words."

There is something that Chernin is doing with books, that Corrigan is doing with books, that I am missing out on.

I also liked Corrigan's book (err, probably "I also liked Corrigan") because she was feminist in her behavior but not in rhetoric. Like certain professors and coworkers I've had, she was feminist in that she was a woman "doing her thing" and doing it well, not because she strived to be "a woman doing her thing". She had no shame in her identification with female heroines and themes. I definitely struggle with feeling like my reading list (or my behavior or my appearance or my...) is sometimes "too female."

Finally, I liked Corrigan because she had made her love of books her life. Here I will replace the ever-so-refined "envious" with the punchy "jealous." There are plenty of reasons why I ended up with books as a pastime rather than a career, but I don't always things they're good ones. By her own admission Corrigan is incredibly lucky to have built a career around books and it gives me (again) inspiration to engage more with books. "I have a great job--or, to be more accurate, cluster of jobs--for a bookworm," says Corrigan.

Recommended for fellow bookworms.