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Classics For Pleasure
Michael Dirda
#UC0222
Hardcover, 341 pages; 2007
$25.00
 Members' Price: $21.25
In this delightfully browsable book, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michael Dirda selects a fascinating collection of mankind's greatest written works, and highlights exactly what's so lastingly enjoyable about each one. With an abundance of wit and enthusiasm, Dirda presents the authors and their masterpieces by categories such as "Words from the Wise"(Erasmus, Samuel Johnson…); "Love's Mysteries"(Sören Kierkegaard, Daphne du Maurier…); "Lives of Consequence"(Plutarch, W. H. Auden…); "Traveler's Tales"(Jules Verne, Isak Dinesen…); and more. There are wonderful little surprises throughout: who would have guessed, for example, that Robert Burton's seventeenth-century tome entitled The Anatomy of Melancholy is "slyly, dryly, pervasively funny"? I was also amused to find that Dirda—clearly an admirer of Henry James—cited H. G. Wells as saying that "reading James's fiction was like watching a hippopotamus painfully attempting to pick up a pea." Certain to lead you (and/or your book club) to a wealth of gratifying literature, Classics for Pleasure is itself a joy to read.
(CH)
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