Browsing as a way of life

Michael Dirda sounds a lot like me in Browsings (2015), a collection of essays he wrote several years ago for The American Scholar. No, I have not written for The Washington Post and a number of other prominent publications. No, I am not a member of The Baker Street Irregulars and a number of other notable organizations. No, I am not that smart. But when it comes to being incapable of resisting the allure of a used book store, Dirda and I are, as Stan Laurel might put it, like two peas in a pot.

Dirda covers a lot of ground in these essays, but one topic he returns to again and again is the endless allure of books -- bookstores, spring book sales, thrift shops where old books might be found in a corner somewhere, forgotten books, obscure books, books on books. Again and again, Dirda, also a native Ohioan born in the 1940s, reminds me of me.

The author confesses that he received a D in English the first semester of his senior year in high school, even though by this time he was already hooked on books. Yet he went on to Oberlin and became a scholar in literature and a regular Washington Post columnist on books. And although he can write authoritatively about James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Updike and the like, his true passion, it turns out, runs more to Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic science fiction. Give him a vintage pulp magazine or some book from the 1930s by an author nobody else remembers, and he is a happy man.

"Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information," Dirda writes. "I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life." Yes, that sounds like me.