My favorite books about books (and the authors who write them)

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence is Geoff Dyer’s sprawling, hilarious account of trying to write a book about the writer who made him want to write. As Dyer tracks Lawrence across the globe—from Greece to Italy to England to Mexico to New Mexico—he delights in the unexpected parallels he discovers between himself and his literary idol (“We are skinny, narrow-shouldered men, Lawrence and I”) and suggests that we follow in the footsteps of our favorite writers “to claim kin with them, to be guided by them.”

Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch tells the story of Mead’s lifelong relationship with George Eliot and that writer’s greatest novel. As well as tracing the arc of Eliot’s biography and exploring its uncanny reverberations in Mead’s own life, Mead investigates the way in which her understanding of Middlemarch changed as she did. In a passage I might have written of my own evolving grasp of To the Lighthouse, she writes, “There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows… This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance. It might lead us back to the library in midlife, looking for something that eluded us before.”

This is a compilation of essays about Batuman’s experience of studying Russian literature at Stanford. Wondering about “possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books,” Batuman traces the literal and figurative path of writers such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Babel, finding answers in their life and work while at the same time exploring their influence upon a motley group of Slavic scholars and readers.

In U and I: A True Story, the death of Donald Barthelme inspires Nicholson Baker to write a book about his obsession with John Updike while his muse is still alive. Coining the term “memory criticism,” which he defines as “a form of commentary that relies entirely on what has survived in a reader’s mind from a particular writer over at least ten years of spotty perusal,” Baker embarks upon a wildly entertaining meditation that reveals as much about the writing process as it does about Updike (and Baker) himself.

“About seven years ago,” Rachel Cohen writes at the beginning of Austen Years, “not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author.” Weaving together memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Cohen draws upon five of Austen’s novels to make sense of her own life and work as she raises young children, moves across the country, and grapples with her father’s death. The result is a brilliant and beautiful reflection upon family and loss, isolation and transcendence, and reading and rereading.