Books, Books, and More Books: Shelf-Awareness Column

Everyone loves a list, and today I'm featured on Shelf-Awareness with a list of some of my favorite books and bookish opinions, including this, which will be familiar to long-time blog readers who lived the Moby-Dick experience with me:

Book you most want to read again for the first time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I read it later in life, having studiously avoided college classes where it might be required, and I devoted a summer to the project, self-shamed into tackling the Great American Novel. I read as a reader, savoring the prose and not worrying about footnotes and English department interpretations, and I often found my way to the pages at four in the morning thanks to a bout of insomnia, startled to find myself immersed in a postmodern book written before modernism was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I cried when I reached the end as Labor Day loomed, and honestly considered starting the whole thing over again right then. It remains the most majestic and perfect reading experience of my life.

Read the rest: http://shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2603#m29957