Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

Edited by Laura Furman and Elinore Standard / Carroll & Graf, 1997, pp. 330, $13.95

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, me University of Texas at San Antonio

"Sometimes," wrote Virginia Woolf, "I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading." Dante Alighieri imagined that it could also be hell; aroused by a book to consummate illicit love, his Paolo and Francesca suffer eternal, infernal torment. While Oscar Wilde wrote rhymes about being imprisoned in Reading Gaol, reluctant pupils feel as if they experience a similar fate.

For those who indulge in the bizarre practice of gazing at and grazing through mottled sheets of paper, reading seems utterly natural. However, what Joseph Epstein calls"that lovely, anti-social, splendidly selfish habit known as reading" has a finite history. Developments in electronic technology challenge its future. After four centuries in which books were the instrument and embodiment of serious culture, printed texts are being displaced by alternative media. Aliteracy--the disinclination to read by those who can--is epidemic. Nevertheless, more volumes are being published than ever before, and many are self-conscious or defensive--histories of book culture and apologies for the medium. Bookworms is a very readable compendium that pays homage to the endangered habit. It is likely to delight readers, while others ignore it.

For the first of their collection's six sections, the editors offer passages in which Alan Bennett, Clarice Lispector, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Rodriguez, Tobias Wolff, VS. Pritchett, and others recall the childhood discovery of reading. In the second part, writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Lamb, Anthony Trollope, and W.H. Auden provide a taxonomy of readers--skimmers, omnivores, serialists, and amnesiacs, among them. The third section records mixed reactions by Jane Austen, Rachel Hadas, Franz Kafka, Giacomo Leopardi, and Eudora Welty to being read to aloud. In the fourth, Vartan Gregorian, Sven Birkerts, Kirkpatrick Sale, and others contemplate the fate of reading in a post-literate world. Section Five, assigned the odd title "Queen Lear," affirms the power of reading to transcend woe. The final section is a miscellany in praise of the perusing practice.

John Keats' sonnet "On First...