13 Ways

In 2001, while working on the book which became her novel, Good Faith, author Jane Smiley got stuck at about manuscript page 260. Confused. Lost in a dark wood, as she put it. She closed the file on the book and decided to read a hundred novels. Her new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, is the result--twelve thoughtful and wonderfully written chapters about the novel, and then brief discussions of the hundred--or more as she proceeded associatively through her project--books she read. Yes, the table of contents lays them out in a list, so that reading groups and serious readers can go right to rummaging for ideas about what to read. The reviewer at Christian Science Monitor, Maureen Kehe, immediately counted up how many of them she had read. (45, but she had to cheat a little.)
       Books about books and reading are not every reader's cup of tea, but we have a good many of them and they get a fair lot of use. The subject heading Books and reading--United States pulls up a selection; or try these ; or books about book groups, or book collectors, or owning a bookstore; or very particular reading programs like Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust. Or 'best books' books like Eleanor Gehres' The best American novels of the twentieth century still readable today (great title!).
       Maybe this kind of thing works for you, and maybe it doesn't. But we do know that by far what our users read the most of are novels--general fiction, classics, mysteries, and their cousins. Adult fiction is about 25% of what we own, and more than 30% of circulation, and that doesn't even include authors like Louisa May Alcott (yes, Little Women is on Smiley's list), Patricia MacLachlan's Sarah, Plain and Tall, or the Harry Potters, since it was simpler to run the stats on adult books only.