How Literature Saved My Life Paperback – Illustrated, November 5, 2013

I keep thinking in adjectives as I try to summarize, for myself, why I love this book: it's brilliant, it's messy, it's non-linear, it's self-contradictory, it's honest to the point of grittiness at times. It's lifelike.This is what consciousness is, isn't it? A messy, ever-sifting mélange of Proust and Spiderman, George W. Bush and Leo Tolstoy. Shields is an intellectual pack-rat. He saves everything. This is a book that rewards re-reading and re-thinking. It made me uncomfortable, which in the end I had to accept as a gift. Shields says, "I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption. Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself."This book IS dangerous. It's subversive. Like Shields's last book, Reality Hunger, it made me question almost everything inherent in my five-decade love affair with literature -- from what I love to why I love it to what my motivations are. I constantly had to stop reading so that I could think. Much of what's written (or presented) in literature and art encourages us to live a vicarious life. What I love about this book is that it encourages us to live one of our own.Does it answer the question implied in its title? Yes. No. Sort of. Absolutely. Shields of all people recognizes that answers to this question must be endlessly multiform and provisional. Ultimately, it is less a treatise than a meta-conversation, and the sensation I had upon completing it was similar to how I feel after having spent hours in harrowing talk with a good friend about things that matter: clarified, exhausted, frustrated, unable to stop thinking.

The only reason I am giving 4 stars instead of 5 is that many of the discussions were too short. But this is a wonderful analysis of how the books discussed affected Shields. The discussion is so good, the only fault I can find is when he just lists books rather than discussing them, or when he just gives a one sentence review that doesn't tell you very mych. I got many suggestions here for new books to get. Finally, in this electronic age, always good to see someone praise the virtues of reading.

My thoughts on this book are perfectly captured in Shields' thoughs on another book. On page 139, Shields writes about Renata Adler's 'Speedboat' -- "What is the book, exactly -- a novel? memoir? cultural criticism? philosophical investigation? journal? journalism? stand-up comedy? [...] The chapter titles don't very accurately or fully describe their ostensible contents. The material can't be held by its titular container."The bottom line is that this book did not meet the expectations that the big title set up. I was expecting an intimate account of hard times the writer found himself in and how he found within literature either the courage or wisdom necessary to persevere. Instead, I got got a man occasionally talking about himself with his arms crossed and showing no emotion whatsoever.

Hard to imagine how Shields pulled off this neat trick: a discussion that is both dispassionate and heartfelt. This lyric on the relationship of writer/reader to writing, the indispensable (oxygen-dispensing) role literature plays in the life of the mind and the heart, is oddly enchanting and consoling. Shields has a way of situating (and playing) the Self in an age of disintegration that allows the reader to navigate not only the writing (both that of Shields and of the pieces under discussion), but also to meditate on, gain enlightenment on, the perilous integration of his/her own Self. (People tend to confuse the "Shields" depicted in these pages with the writer himself...really, the "I" talking to us, Shields's Shields, is all of us, in one way or another.) Ultimately, the book is a paean to the beautifully written word and the consolations it affords, a depiction of the 21st-century soul struggling for sanity and sound footing in an age with precious little of either...and a good atlas to boot.

didn't work for me. predictable, no subtlety.