The Books in My Life

Conceived at Big Sur as the first installment of a projected study of his whole reading life, the book runs on a paradox Miller states up front: the great lesson of a life of passionate reading is that you should read less, and live more. What follows disobeys the lesson on every page — chapters of ravenous enthusiasm for the books that built him, from Rider Haggard's She and the boyhood adventure shelf (taken as seriously as any classic) to the Brooklyn afternoon a friend stopped him on the street to say a writer called Dostoevsky existed, a moment he ranks with falling in love.

The heart of the book is advocacy. Miller writes as literature's debtor, paying forward: long, evangelizing chapters on Blaise Cendrars — in his telling the most alive writer of the age, and criminally unread in English — and on Jean Giono, the novelist of Provence, stand among the era's great acts of literary friendship. And the appendix became legend: 'The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most,' a list readers have been mining, and arguing with, since 1952. Chapter to chapter it is the warmest book he ever wrote — the rage all burned off, the appetite intact.

A reading autobiography in loose chapters: the boyhood canon of adventure and blood, defended without apology; the street-corner annunciation of Dostoevsky; the crusading essays on Cendrars and Giono; a chapter on the theater of his youth; meditations on influence, on rereading, on why the books that matter are the ones that send you away from books. Running underneath, the Big Sur doctrine: reading as a live wire between lives, not a refuge from living.

Then the appendices, including the hundred-books list — the most quoted pages, and the best argument-starter Miller ever published. Dip anywhere; it is a book built for browsing, by a man who read that way.