The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life

On holiday I speed read the book: The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life by Andy Miller.  Amazon's robots recommended  this book to me. Andy had a young son, and was feeling in a bit of rut. He no longer had time for reading, apart from the long train commute to London, but he just pissed the time away. His background was in English literature and he was working in publishing, but he clearly felt he was being creative enough and had lost contact with books.

Anyway he got back to reading "classic" books again.  In the past he had even claimed to have read some of the books, he was now reading. Like many people he had a huge collection of books.

It was kind of strange, because he was reading "classic" books and then reading Mr Men books to his son. Like many people he worried that all this book buying was just "shopping." It was interesting that he didn't worry that he could not write any novel, although he had written two earlier books.


I liked the quote from the philosopher .

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The story of my life.