An enthusiastic paean to the comfort, joy, and self-awareness that we find in literature.
Reading like your life depends on it.
Ask journalist and author Mangan what she did as a child, and she will tell you what she read. Her book maps the growth of her mind and body through the pleasures of the text. She never felt more grown-up, she recalls, than “when I first took my seat opposite the newspaper spikes…and started doing my homework [in the library] for the first time.” She goes to university with a great love for Jane Austen. She quotes Virginia Woolf: Austen “was the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” And yet, learning about “free indirect discourse” as an undergraduate, Mangan found Jane’s greatness in her way of both “inhabiting and viewing a consciousness at the same time.” The books that Mangan loves, then, are those that bring such consciousness to life. We are the heroes of our own novels, and like all great novelists, we must learn to see our childhood from our own adult perspective. We must become like Dickens or Charlotte Brontë, able to inhabit a young narrator but always to have the perspective of maturity. The best books are those that show the child in the adult and the adult in the child: “The real magic of the books…lies in the seriousness with which the childish pursuits are treated.” She thus advises: Follow “your bookish instincts.” Read not just to escape the world but to live in it, to learn how to negotiate a friendship, hold a job, and find that “precious constant in a life that increasingly seems to have too few of them.” Some live to read. Mangan reads to live.
An enthusiastic paean to the comfort, joy, and self-awareness that we find in literature.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798897100446
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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