Michael Dirda

Bound to Please is a wonderful book. Subtitled An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education, it’s just what it says on the box.

It’s a compilation of book reviews and a few essays by Michael Dirda, who is the book critic for the Washington Post . He is extraordinarily well-read, and is able to bring his vast experience as a reader to write illuminating reviews of an eclectic collection of books. Each article pulls you in, even when he’s looking at books and authors who you may not have read or will never read.

Dirda’s reviews are so well written that this volume is hard to put down. Just as you feel you’ve had enough, your eye drifts to the next article and before you know it you’re reading a review of the collected letters of Flaubert, or of a biography of John Ruskin, or of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or of the collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges or… As I say, a very wide-ranging, eclectic selection of literature.

It’s delightful to me that Dirda is so enthusiastic about so many authors who I have already experienced and enjoyed: A. S. Byatt, Phillip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, Anthony Trollope, Edith Nesbit and many more. He’s a big fan of quality science fiction as well as the classics. Amazingly, he even knows his comic books. In fact, at times you feel that this man has read every book in the world.

And he makes you want to read everything too. It’s almost enough to make you despair, as you read the next review and think My gosh, I’d like to read that. If one only had but world enough and time…

This is a book which will make you fall in love with reading all over again. It’s a treasury of delights.… (mehr)

Michael Dirda’s magisterial collection of critical essays, Bound to Please, carries the subtitle An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education. I confess that subtitle aroused my skepticism; however, I can report quite happily that this is not an example of that unfortunate tendency in American culture of hyperbole to surpass substance. Mr. Dirda’s book is, in fact, an extraordinary one-volume literary education.

It’s safe to say that Michael Dirda is a critic’s critic. His prose is energetic and rigorous, yet unforced. He is a gloriously catholic reader who conveys news from literary worlds that many if not most of his readers have not explored, and probably in many cases didn’t know existed. I particularly appreciated his writing on science fiction, which is edifying and has aroused my own interest in the genre. Furthermore, Mr. Dirda is au courant on translations and editions (his remarks on editions, out-of-print books, and used bookstores divulge, I think, the fact that he is, unsurprisingly, a bibliophile in the sense that he loves books as objects as well as the prose they contain) and this information will no doubt aid those in search of the books and authors he reviews.

Other than Edmund Wilson and the critics I read for my college thesis—e.g. Rene Wellek, Joseph Frank, and Mikhail Bakthin—I confess to a paucity of knowledge about the field. I have found a great deal of contemporary academic criticism opaque and self-indulgent—redolent of what George Jean Nathan once said about criticism: that it is “…the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the author’s fame.” Michal Dirda commits no such offense here, but rather elucidates for the common reader the great books and authors of all time and for all time.
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