How Literature Saved My Life

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2013: Anyone who gives a hoot about the status and the future of storytelling needs this rangy, brainy, bad-ass book--a book that celebrates books, dissects books, and pays homage to the creators of our stories. Packed with riffs and rants--some hilarious, some brilliant, some flat-out zany--this is caffeinated, mad-genius stuff: sly, manic, thoughtful, and witty. (Shields' three-page self-comparison to George W. Bush--"he likes to watch football and eat pretzels"--is especially fun.) At times, I felt like I was on a madcap tour of an eccentric professor's private basement library, never knowing what was around the next corner. My review copy is littered with underlines and exclamation points and, yes, a handful of WTFs. Part critical analysis, part essay, and part memoir, How Literature Saved My Life offers its liveliest passages when Shields reveals Shields. A stutterer, he developed an early kinship with the written word, since the spoken word came to him with "dehumanizing" difficulty. Which makes one of his final lines all the more potent: "Language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn't, not quite." --Neal Thompson