How Reading Changed My Life

In her book of essays How Reading Changed My Life (1998), American journalist Anna Quindlen describes her life-long love affair with fiction, arguing both for the importance of serious fiction and against the “snobbery” shown by literary critics toward “middlebrow” literature. Reviews were mixed. Some critics admired Quindlen’s style—“tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary and a pleasure to read” (Publishers’ Weekly)—while others found the book’s content “every bit as gooey and obvious as its title would indicate” (Kirkus Reviews). Quindlen is a veteran opinion columnist whose New York Times column “Public and Private” won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Much of the book focuses on Quindlen’s childhood relationship with literature. She recalls growing up in a home where there were few books—Readers’ Digest, the Bible—but where she read voraciously, courtesy of a library card. She also relates a feeling common to many bookish children, of alienation from parents who couldn’t understand their daughter’s need to read. Quindlen speaks passionately of that need:
“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion…I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.”

Quindlen pays tribute to a friend of her parents, Mrs. LoFurno, who invited the bookish girl to explore her extensive collection of books. Quindlen credits this kindness with opening new worlds to her. However, she also stresses that Mrs. LoFurno’s book collection was valuable to her, in part, precisely because it was eclectic, enthusiastic, and not restricted by highbrow ideas of what is good.



As Quindlen grew older, literature continued to open new doors. In particular, she argues that literature helped her to understand her sexual being and to develop a political conscience. She traces the role that books like John Galsworthy's The Forsyth Saga and Mary McCarthy's The Group played in her psychosexual development, and she recalls an occasion on which her mother hurled her Book-of-the-Month club volume angrily across the room. “Didn’t she know that I would…[hear] her distress signal as the clarion cry to forbidden fruit?” The book was Philip Roth’s notorious sex comedy Portnoy’s Complaint. However, “it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive.”

“Sedition,” for Quindlen, is one of the core purposes of literature. She offers a potted history of the written word as a tool of political dissent, from Martin Luther to Betty Friedan, noting along the way that oppressive regimes are always quick to suppress literature (the Nazis burned books; American slaves were forbidden from reading).

Quindlen’s own political values were shaped by the novels of Dickens and the Bible, in which she found clear visions of social justice and injustice.



Toward the end of the essay, Quindlen returns to the subject of literary snobbery, recalling her shocking teenage discovery that some people divided books into the “right” books and the “wrong” ones. She was upset when one of her college professors poured scorn on her beloved Galsworthy: “The despotism of the educated was in full flower: there was a right way to read and a wrong way, and the wrong way was worse than wrong—it was middlebrow, that code word for those who valued the enjoyable, the riveting, the moving, and the involving as well as the eternal…But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated and that some of them are not addressed by Homer.”

The book concludes with eleven reading lists compiled by Quindlen, including big thick wonderful books that could take you a whole summer to read (but aren't beach books); nonfiction books that help us understand the world; books that will help a teenager feel more human; books I would save in a fire; books for a girl who is full of beans (or ought to be); mystery novels I'd most like to find in a summer rental; books recommended by a really good elementary school librarian; good book-club selections; modern novels that made me proud to be a writer; books my exceptionally well-read friend Ben says he's taken the most from; books I just love to read, and always will.