More Book Lust || a familiar recipe with new ingredients...
Written: Oct 06 '08
Product Rating:
Pros: Incredibly diverse topics; enticing descriptions draw you in; pick a selection and dive in...
Cons: You aint got time to read 'em all; take yur time, pick a good one...
The Bottom Line: No one has mastered the 'two-sentence-teaser' as well as Nancy Pearl. She could make you want to read the fine-print on a box of headache powders. Maybe the next book.
sleeper54's Full Review: Nancy Pearl - More Book Lust: Recommended Reading ...
... Sequels are always a dicey business. Trying to catch lightning in a bottle the second time can be a tricky task.
The fiction sequel needs to rework old characters, settings, and story lines into a completely new menu. The nonfiction sequel, like your family's favorite holiday recipe, needs only to be as tasty and filling as your memories of last year's dish.
Nancy Pearl's More Book Lust meets that challenge easily. Following 2003's Book Lust, this one follows the same recipe to deliver a fresh literary treat with a thousand new and different flavors. It is interesting that Pearl herself thinks of this one, not as a sequel to the first but rather "...as its true companion ... the two sitting on someone's bookshelf—not next to each other, but rather bookending rows and rows of books ... discovered, or rediscovered, and thoroughly enjoyed, from reading..." these two books.
A lifelong self-described 'readaholic' and a working librarian of many years and a few decades, Pearl once again compiles a thousand (yes, a thousand..!) new reading suggestions into list after list after list that any reader could use to find tasty textual treats too enticing to resist.
Each list shares a few, or many, 'quality reads' that match that list's theme. The themes cover all the age ranges and interests. Topics are as diverse as the opening Adapting to Adoption and the closing list of works showcasing Your Tax Dollars at Work: Good Reading from the Government (Really!)
The 120-plus lists (as the back-cover blurb claims ... no I did not count them, I was too busy reading them) feature over a 1000 books (see the previous parenthetical comment...) that could map out a lifetime of stories and ideas for any recreational reader.
An unusual list that I do not remember from the original Book Lust is Dewey Deconstructed. One of the longer lists here, it walks the reader through the 'Dewey centuries'. From the "books about books" and the encyclopedias of the Dewey naughts through the science and mathematics of the 500s to the history and geography tomes of the 900s, Pearl shares short, insightful thoughts with her readers about dozens of interesting reads.
Short and insightful is a key idea in this book. Most of the summaries or 'micro-reviews' she shares are just a sentence or two long. Yet most paint a picture of a character you must meet; or a setting you must see with your own mind's eye; or a story so enticing you feel you should read or your literary life would somehow be incomplete.
The diversity of niche genres and selected points-of-view explored in this book is stunning: countries around the world explored in fiction and non-fiction, specific authors' works (Iowa boy Bill Bryson, David Halberstam, Neal Stephenson, and several others), time travel, war, comedy, science, Queen Victoria, codes and ciphers . . .. Hey, you think of an interest you have ... or one you want to cultivate; you will likely find a list and a book or three in here that will meet your need.
The Bottom Line If your reading has gotten a little stale, if you are thinking maybe you need to try something a little different...you could do worse than reaching for More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl. Actually, you could not do much better.
Pick it up, check it out ...and get your reading glasses ready for a workout.
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