Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

All reviews copyright 1984-2017 Evelyn C. Leeper.


BOUND TO PLEASE: ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS AND THEIR BOOKS by Michael Dirda:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/01/2005]

Michael Dirda's BOUND TO PLEASE: ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS AND THEIR BOOKS (ISBN 0-393-05757-7) is a collection of some of his book reviews from 1978 to 2003. One of things worth noting is that Dirda does not review only "literary" fiction or non-fiction. He includes an entire section of "Serious Entertainers" (Vernon Lee, Avram Davidson, Terry Pratchett, and a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs), as well as an appendix of a basic reading list of science fiction. Lest you think this is just setting up a "ghetto" for this, I'll point out that Dirda includes Philip Pullman's THE AMBER SPYGLASS in his "Writers of Our Time" section.

One problem from a reader's perspective is that this is not a good book to read from the library. There are probably close to a hundred reviews here, and after many of them you will want to stop, think about it, go out and find the book(s) discussed, and read them before going on to the next review. Given the usual lending periods of most libraries, this will not be possible. (Of course, from the writer's perspective, this just means that people are more likely to buy the book.) Obviously this was less of a problem when the reviews first appeared, one a week, in the Washington Post. (I've already added works by Fernando Pessoa, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Iain Sinclair, as well as Tyndale's translation of the Bible.)