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Five Books for People Who Really Love Books

If you really love books, or you want to love them more, I have five recommendations. None of these are traditional literary criticism; they’re not dry or academic. They take all kinds of forms (essay, novel, memoir) and focus on the many connections we can form with what we read. Those relationships might be passionate, obsessive, even borderline inappropriate—and this is what makes the books so lovable. Read more

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Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book that Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos

Biographies of Muslim books remain few and far between, though (even the Princeton series so far includes only the all-too-obvious Qur’an). So, in recounting the life of an Islamic text as its fortunes waxed and waned over centuries, Wonders and Rarities is something of a rarity itself. Read more

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Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

This book’s playful title announces both its subject and its tone … This may sound like dry stuff, but the narrative both sparkles with geeky wit…and shines with an infectious enthusiasm … Duncan brings his chronicle into the digital present before closing with not one, but two indexes: a machine-generated one and a human-compiled one, by Paula Clarke Bain, member of the Society of Indexers, whose wit matches the author’s and underscores his passionate appreciation of the art … Always erudite, frequently funny, and often surprising—a treat for lovers of the book qua book. Read more

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I love books about books. Here are seven of my current favorites.

Gary Goodman helped establish Stillwater, Minn., as another “book town,” one deliberately modeled on the celebrated Welsh original, Hay-on-Wye. In Goodman’s witty, self-deprecating account of impulsively buying a crummy used bookstore, gradually improving its stock, and eventually meeting notable fellow dealers here and abroad (including McMurtry and Hay’s “King” Richard Booth), his tone periodically grows elegiac. Read more

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