Review: The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen

 

Sometimes the perfect book comes into your life at exactly the moment you need it most. It's all part of the serendipity of life. I happened to be wandering around a Half Price Books location in my area because they had emailed me a 15% discount coupon in celebration of my birthday. Some of you know that I have a love/hate relationship with that particular book chain, entirely dependent on whether I'm wearing my buyer's hat or my seller's hat (a hat I have permanently retired) that day. That and the fact that Half Price books so unceremoniously closed up the store location 15 minutes from me, leaving me sitting sort of in between drives of 35 minutes or 45 minutes to two of their now-closest stores. It's a chore to get to either one of them in Houston traffic, so I hardly shop Half Price Books anymore and I used to spend a small fortune at the nearer location on a regular basis.

While browsing the store's tiny Literary Criticism section, I found Steve Leveen's 2005 book The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. It was only when I got it home that I noticed that this first edition copy is signed "Steve" even though it doesn't look as if the cover had been cracked open since Steve signed it. 

But it is definitely what is inside that makes this 111 page book so special to me - and I'm sure to others. The book is divided into five chapters titled:

1. "Uncovering the Books That Will Change Your Life"
2. "Seizing More from Your Reading"
3. "Reading with Your Ears"
4. "Sharing the Fellowship of Books"
5. "A Life Uplifted"

In addition, are Leveen's great kick-off prologue and an extensive bibliography I plan to dig into as time allows. 

The Little Guide is filled with tips and so many quotes that I could barely keep up with them. The quotes and points may sound simplistic to your ear at first, but they all make legitimate points and offer encouragement to readers who don't feel comfortable following the beaten path that most readers take: a life of reading classics from "Great Books lists" compiled by others or one of chasing the bestseller hits that everyone else seems to be reading at the same time. As Leveen puts it in the prologue:

"Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else's reading list Unless a book is good for you, you won't connect with it and gain from it. Just as no one can tell you how to lead your life, no one can tell you what to read for your life."

During Leveen's research for The Little Guide, he uncovered some of the best quotes about books and reading that I've ever seen in one place, and he's not bashful about sharing them here. These are some of my favorites:

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading now, or surrender yourself to self-ignorance." - Atwood H. Townsend, On Reading

"The way a book is read - which is to say the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it...Anyone who can read can learn how to read deeply and thus live more fully." - Norman Cousins

"When one stops to consider what life would be like without the ability to read after age forty or thereabouts, and the consequences for the life of the mind in general, eyeglasses suddenly appear as important as the wheel." - Barbara Tuchman, The Book

And there are many, many others both from Leveen and from others. In fact, here's one last one from Leveen (perhaps my favorite quote in the whole book):

"While we should exercise our entire lives, we do not generally improve at physical activities after age thirty or so but merely retard physical aging. Reading is almost the opposite. If you have led an active reading life, your reading power at age eighty will tower over you reading power at age thirty."

I found the only discouraging (not intentionally discouraging on Leveen's part) thought in the book in its fourth chapter about "sharing the fellowship of books." I've kind of yearned to be part of a really good book group for years, but I've never been able to find one that feels comfortable - especially since the vast majority of them are populated 100% by women. And starting an all-male one or even a mixed one from scratch has always seemed too difficult a challenge. Several pages of Chapter 4 give all the reasons why more men are not part of book groups, the primary one being that women purposely won't have us because we change the whole "dynamic" of the group. I get it...but come on. Give a guy a chance.

I know you can sense my enthusiasm about The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life already, so I'll just end by saying if you are looking for something like this in your life right now, this is the one.