A Passion for Books

Despite the title of this collection of original essays by well-known authors, critics and book business figures, the length, mood and tone of these pieces seem designed more to resist than to stimulate passion. Each contributor provides a conversational summary--ranging from the likable to the irritating--of a formative literary experience. All agree that books supply an imaginative variety and richness that trumps the competition, especially television and the Internet. The World Wide Web is the Darth Vader of this anthology--the dark side of literacy that draws young Jedi knights away from Proust and Eliot and even from What Katy Did, Huck Finn and Little Women. Laurence Lerner, in something of a failure of imagination, asks, ""Who derives sensuous pleasure from the pale gray of his computer casing, or the electron flow across the screen?"" Catherine Peters worries that audiobooks may spell the end of reading while Ferdinand Mount bemoans the rise of ""critical theory,"" although he is vague on what ""critical theory"" is, exactly. Despite the overly serious, pessimistic and even defensive tone, there are plenty of entertaining moments. Bibliographer Thomas Tanselle strives to break down the border between collecting books and reading them, Salwak offers a moving personal account of becoming a devoted reader of the poet Philip Larkin, only to be faced with scandalous biographical revelations about him. Most salutary of all, historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein closes the volume by pointing out that ""premature obituaries"" for the book have a long history: Western reading habits, she writes, ""are likely to persist, no matter how many new electronic instruments are devised."" (Aug.)