I recently finished Sara Gran’s wild and imaginative “The Book of the Most Precious Substance” and I realized that over the last year I’ve read a handful of good books about books. I don’t mean novels about the publishing industry, I usually find those superficial and predictable. No, these are stories that put the radical power of reading or the quest for a particular book at the center of the experience. In Gran’s “The Book of the Most Precious Substance,” two booksellers – each with their own motives – have gradually succumbed to the occult power of the rarest of all books. Their quest for it takes them into the orbits of billionaire tech entrepreneurs, book-obsessed collectors and a compassionate dominatrix. The second book is Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Until I read this book, I never quite understood how transgressive the act of reading can be. If this book isn’t in your permanent library, remedy that by all means. Nafisi was an English literature professor at the University of Tehran when the mullahs began to pressure her about her curriculum. Nafisi created a small reading group at her apartment and her students began to find common threads between their own lives and the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Henry Miller and Nabokov. And since I’m on a mission to persuade more of you to read translated fiction, my last book about books is Ann Morgan’s “The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe.” Morgan is a British journalist and she writes with a compelling yet breezy style of her year of reading a translated book from every country in the world. She’s my hero! Did you guess last week's Thread correctly? The answer is: Fried squash blossoms from "Eat, Pray, Love."
— Kerri Miller | MPR News |