A lively aperitif for the picky reader
Make way for a truly magical, magnificent book about books.
Even if you are not presently partial to reading, you soon will be, under the invigorating counsel of authorpublisher Graham Tarrant’s encyclopedic “For the Love of Books: Stories of Literary Lives, Banned Books, Author Feuds, Extraordinary Characters, and More” (Skyhorse, 239 pp., $19).
Tarrant, a former publisher and anthology editor with 30 books of his own on subjects from cinema to cricket, reports: “This is a light-hearted book about books and the people who write them. It has stories, characters and plots, which are all the more compelling for being true.”
After all, we live in an oddball world. Dorothy Sayers (18931957) became one of the first women to graduate from Oxford and make a career of writing religious plays and detective stories. Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72) wrote mysteries under the name of Nicholas Blake. J.K. Rowling (born 1965) provided Harry Potter books using initials rather than her name, Joanne, to avoid the insistent disdain of male readers.
Tarrant’s book is rife with surprises. Among my favorites: “An interviewer once tactlessly said to Joseph Heller (1923-99) that the author had never written anything else as good as his 1961 novel Catch-22. To which Heller snappily retorted, ‘Who has?’ ”
Nice shot.
One more, sage advice from Jack London (1876-1916): “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
But the truly triumphant story of stories reported by Tarrant concerns 12-year-old Ricardo Oliveira Costa of a small community in the northeast of Brazil. He loved to read.
The boy dreamed of building a library. For four years he painted pictures and sold enough of them to buy land. Then he went door to door asking people to donate books. He transported those books in a purple suitcase on wheels until he, “the Boy of Books,” had collected 5,000 volumes. Word spread, and finally, an international sponsor donated the rest of the money needed to erect a single-story library.
Reports Tarrant: “In 2017, in front of a grateful and admiring community, Ricardo cut the red ribbon that opened his brandnew library. One boy’s remarkable story — and all for the love of books.”
Indeed, bibliophiles, this is the book you want to buy ahead and distribute to friends for the holidays. Offbeat, compelling and impossible to put down, it brings alive the library that books — and the wonderful Ricardo Oliveira — built.