Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

by Maureen Corrigan

Book Overview

In this delightful memoir, the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air reflects on her life as a professional reader. Maureen Corrigan takes us from her unpretentious girlhood in working-class Queens, to her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375504257
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 201 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.8" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

M from DC

Maureen Corrigan, book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air, has written a terrific memoir of her life as a reader that is every bit as engaging, witty, and irreverent as her popular broadcasts. Here she tells the story of her own life while expounding on different extreme adventure stories women (and men) in literature undergo from Jane Eyre's endless trials to find a home with Mr. Rochester to the more swashbuckling adventures of Nancy Drew and other "girl" detectives. Although Corrigan offers many serious and sweeping insights into literature, the book is other things, too: the story of growing up Catholic and shy in Sunnyside, Queens; the extreme adventure story of graduate school at Penn, which spurred her to "escape" through mysteries; the story of infertility and (later) adopting her beloved daughter, Molly, from China; and an eclectic list of book recommendations ranging from The Maltese Falcon to Pride and Prejudice. What ties these idiosyncratic strands together is Corrigan's unflagging intelligence and her wonderful voice. I love this book and its boundless enthusiasm for literature of all kinds.

This Book Made Me Want to Read Again

This is a book for anyone who loves reading; and perhaps, like me, needs a reason to remember what we can GET out of reading in the midst of juggling family, jobs, and all the other responsibilities that seem to interfere with what was for many of us our first love -- books. Corrigan, whose reviews on "Fresh Air" for NPR I've admired for many years, has a way of looking at books that is fresh and fascinating. She doesn't just tell us the story of HER life with books (although that part is really interesting and at points positively hilarious), she helped me remember my own growing up and learning about myself with books. She is not a snob about books -- she loves my favorite detective fiction as much as most people I know do, and even better, illustrates the deeper aspects of that genre that in a million years I never would have thought of myself. But, most important to me, reading this book made me want to really, really read again, and recapture the for myself the fascination with books and ideas that I grew up with.

An amazing book!

From the first line, in which she confesses that she often prefers reading a book to spending time in even the best company, Maureen Corrigan had me hooked with this hilarious, honest, down-to-earth memoir of her life as a reader. Corrigan is a genius at comically puncturing the pieties we all take for granted. When she and her husband, Rich, adopt their daughter from China, the story is especially moving because she keeps directing us to its more absurd aspects (the couple sit through bad adoption videos and stay in a Chinese hotel that also houses a bordello before finally bringing home their baby daughter). In telling the story of adopting Molly, Corrigan effortlessly evokes many different books from Ruth Reichl's sad adoption saga in Comfort Me with Apples to Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Full of literary recommendations, snappy lines, and clever insights, Leave Me Alone I'm Reading is the best and funniest book I've read in a long time.