The Manifold Beauties of Books

Nicholas Basbanes has had books and writers running through his veins for most of his lifetime, which makes picking up “Every Book Its Reader” the equivalent of browsing through a rare-book store, spending the morning in a public library, and visiting your most literate friend — all in the course of a few hours.

Here Basbanes sets out to identify and showcase some of the world’s most famous and most forgotten books. One of his many wanderings takes him to a secondhand bookstore in Oberlin, Ohio, where he spends $2 on “A Reader’s Guide Book,” an essay collection by May Lamberton Becker. It turns out that her columns in the Saturday Review played an Oprah Winfrey-like role in the 1920s. One of her picks, the 1893 novel “The Heavenly Twins” by Sarah Grand, is still in print and is described as “a fascinating exploration of gender issues and feminist agendas” by the University of Michigan Press.

Basbanes also sits down with some distinguished and voracious readers. Of all of them, Harold Bloom takes the gold medal “because he can sustain a pace upward of a thousand pages an hour.” But he doesn’t “speed-read Shakespeare” because, Bloom says, “I know it all by heart anyway.” This virtuosity is somewhat daunting to those of us who trek around with one rumpled paperback for weeks at a time, but happily Basbanes is a less-intimidating host and has spent many years as a book-review editor. He tells us his aim in matching books and reviewers was “to be fair with the authors, who deserve to be evaluated intelligently on the merits of the work at hand, and nothing else.” Yes, exactly. This is a man to choose as a companion through the highways and byways of bookdom.

Along the way he talks about reading with David McCullough, Robert Coles, Helen Vendler, Christopher Ricks and William Gass, among others. These interviews are somewhat uneven. He clearly loves being in the company of McCullough and Coles, but Vendler’s worldview strikes him as somewhat austere. Poems, she tells him, have maybe 15 levels. Her grammatical and phonetic levels I can handle, but “asseverations” and “propositional content” levels lay cold fingers on warm words. “Most people,” huffs Vendler, “just bring a single level of awareness, which is, ‘What does the poem say?’ “ (Basbanes does pay her tribute as a critic but describes her as reading poetry with “excruciating care.”)

Basbanes is much happier chatting to Robert Coles in his “quaint, comfortable house that looks out on old apple trees.” For Coles’s parents, reading aloud to each other was a lifelong passion. “My father would read to her from Dickens,” says Coles, and his father told him that they were “drinking from the great reservoirs of wisdom.” Coles himself took that passion into every aspect of his adult life as psychiatrist, researcher, teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He also speaks with deep affection of William Carlos Williams, his mentor both as a doctor and an author. They met while Coles was a student at Harvard, and they remained close friends until Williams’s death. Coles describes Williams’s great poem “Paterson” as “nourishment ... like vitamin pills helping me feel a bit stronger” as he struggled through medical school.

In a beguiling but sometimes discursive narrative, Basbanes moves from living readers to dead writers. He is particularly interested in the libraries of famous writers and thinkers, especially if their owners scribbled in the margins or kept “commonplace” notebooks as did both President John Adams and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Basbanes has tracked down annotated libraries at many colleges — the Internet having become an inexhaustible source of information on where to find these collections.

The name of William Shakespeare surfaces repeatedly in different contexts. Thomas Edison thought the playwright “would have been an inventor, a wonderful inventor, if he had turned his mind to it.” Basbanes takes a step further and asks several of his subjects — Harold Bloom, Anthony Burgess, Robert Giroux, Samuel Schoenbaum, Christopher Ricks — what they would ask Shakespeare should he materialize in their living rooms. He shares his own fantasies set in Boston’s Public Garden: “In my wistful agenda,” he dreams, “Shakespeare makes a day-trip to Boston, I am there to greet him, and clever literary journalist that I am, I have assembled a short list of probing questions from a cadre of eminent scholars.” His first question to the Bard of Avon: “Perhaps we can start with you telling me a little bit about your reading, and how it was that you secured access to these books.”

In any meditation on reading through the centuries, the question of greatness inevitably surfaces. Basbanes has tracked down numerous literary scorecards. In the late 1990s James Joyce’s “Ulysses” headed the Modern Library’s list of finest fiction rated by “eminent scholars,” but by 2002 “one hundred major writers from fifty-four countries voted ‘Don Quixote’ the best work of fiction in the world,” and Basbanes agrees the latter is “the greatest novel of them all from any century.” If Oprah would only join the ranks of Cervantes’s fans, he’d have a chance at today’s bestseller list.