Read for Your Life
Books celebrating the value of reading are quite common. Recent additions to the genre include Alexander McCall Smith’s What W.H. Auden Can Do for You (2013) and Clive James’s Latest Readings (2015). Michael McGirr’s Books That Saved My Life casts a wider net into deeper waters than either of these worthy books and he consequently lands a wondrous catch. McGirr focuses on forty writers—each gets a brief chapter—who provided him with lessons in a rich humanity and a more authentic life. He knows that everyone has a story to share, but great writers have the rare talent to tell their stories in a memorable way. The books he celebrates are diverse, ranging from monastic memoirs to modernist novels.
Michael McGirr was in the Jesuit order for twenty-one years before leaving the order, getting married, and beginning a career as a teacher. He teaches at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne. It is clearly a job he loves. Several chapters include instances when a poem or scene…
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