Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere (2012)

by Lauren Leto

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262	24	102,077	(3.19)	15
"Want to impress the hot stranger at the bar who asks for your take on Infinite Jest? Dying to shut up the blowhard in front of you who's pontificating on Cormac McCarthy's "recurring road narratives"? Having difficulty keeping Francine Prose and Annie Proulx straight? For all those overwhelmed readers who need to get a firm grip on the relentless onslaught of must-read books to stay on top of the inevitable conversations that swirl around them, Lauren Leto's Judging a Book by Its Lover is manna from literary heaven! A hilarious send-up of--and inspired homage to--the passionate and peculiar world of book culture, this guide to literary debate leaves no reader or author unscathed, at once adoring and skewering everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Ayn Rand to Dostoyevsky and the people who read them"--P. [4] of cover.… (more)

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Showing 1-5 of 24 (next | show all)

Okay book, though a bit disjointed (as most/many books based on or built from blog posts read to my eyes). Still fun from a bibliophile's or reader's standpoint. (

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SESchend | Feb 2, 2024 |

This was a fun little book. I saw myself in so many of the types of readers and in reader behaviors. I kept thinking all through this book, "Yep, that's me." or "Oh, I do that." I thoroughly enjoyed this and it read a lot quicker than I expected. (

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melrailey | Apr 7, 2020 |

Tries way too hard to be clever, and only manages to be funny part of the time. Otherwise fairly obnoxiously self-aware. (

)

gossamerchild88 | Mar 30, 2018 |

Okay book, though a bit disjointed (as most/many books based on or built from blog posts read to my eyes). Still fun from a bibliophile's or reader's standpoint. (

)

SESchend | Sep 6, 2017 |

Like most collections of columns or blog posts, this is hit and miss. Unlike most collections of columns or blog posts, the hits are very good, and most of the misses are not that bad.

The only part that didn't really work for me is the "how to fake that you've read....". Most of the rest was quite delightful, particularly the pieces where Leto examines her own childhood and familial relations to books.

She is a good writer, and I enjoy her snark and her eye for skewering character, so I suspect I'd probably enjoy reading anything else she writes. (

)

krazykiwi | Aug 22, 2016 |

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Canonical title

Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere

Original title

Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere

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Original publication date

2012

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Epigraph

Dedication

First words

The first book I ever loved was a book about a monster in a child's closet.

Quotations

Author's Note: Let me be plain when I state that my judgments, wisecracks, and sarcastic comments come from a place of deap admiration for every one of the authors whose work I discuss in these pages. There is nothing more beautiful than a well-written book, and there is nothing more admirable than the attempt to create something beautiful.

Life happens alongside the act of reading - a story is forever lixed with where we were and what we were doing while we were reading that book

The day I change my reading habits to preserve the appearance of my books is the day I start to die inside, for surely I'll have stopped loving to read.

Literature connects by transporting people to the same consciousness; a stranger the same book you've read, whose eyes passed over the same words, may be part of a completely different environment, and even time, but for a while, at least, they shared a world with you.

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"Want to impress the hot stranger at the bar who asks for your take on Infinite Jest? Dying to shut up the blowhard in front of you who's pontificating on Cormac McCarthy's "recurring road narratives"? Having difficulty keeping Francine Prose and Annie Proulx straight? For all those overwhelmed readers who need to get a firm grip on the relentless onslaught of must-read books to stay on top of the inevitable conversations that swirl around them, Lauren Leto's Judging a Book by Its Lover is manna from literary heaven! A hilarious send-up of--and inspired homage to--the passionate and peculiar world of book culture, this guide to literary debate leaves no reader or author unscathed, at once adoring and skewering everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Ayn Rand to Dostoyevsky and the people who read them"--P. [4] of cover.

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