Drawn to books about books, I ordered Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Books with a kind of hopeful curiosity. Glancing over the contents after it arrived, I felt a slight despondency: my acquaintance with living writers is patchy, and I recognised few of the contributors to Sean Manning’s collection. Aside from Ray Bradbury, who wrote the foreword, and the names of Francine Prose and Xu Xiaobin, I found little that stirred familiarity, and less that stirred anticipation.
Initial misgivings aside, the essays slowly charmed me, and by the time I had passed fifty pages, I read the remainder with pleasure. In some cases, the writers had not even read the books they held dear. Joyce Maynard writes ruefully of her father’s Bible, given not to her, but to “the girlfriend”: “All my life my father had urged me to read the Bible. Knowing I had never done this, he quoted from it as liberally as a lawyer might invoke the constitution. But in the end, it was not I, his well-loved daughter, but this strange interloper who had taken off with his most precious book. Maybe he’s given up on my ever opening it.”
Throughout the collection, books are celebrated as objects: annotated, well-travelled, occasionally dropped in the bath, always somehow alive. Though the essays are uneven, each possesses a certain tenderness, an affection that lingers even when the prose falters. None of the essays led me to seek out the books they describe, nor did they draw me to the writers themselves, but Bradbury’s recollection of reading Poe as a boy sent me back, unexpectedly, to The Cask of Amontillado, and for that alone, the book earned its place in memory.
>I shied away from this book because I was worried the essays would force me to include many more additions to my wishlist than I have time or money for. But I loved the concept of recalling the importance of not only the act of reading a particular book, but the physicality of the object. It's an idea I think we need more of in a digital age.
>I sense the brief that went to the contributing writers requested a contrast between book and e-book, several touch on the topic. With the focus on books as objects, not one of the essays inspired me to add to my wish list. Bradbury's essay did make me read a couple of Poe stories, which I enjoyed more than I anticipated.