Reading Lessons: A Bibliophile's Kama Sutra

7 hrs. 54 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Alexander Genis

Narrator Sergey Kirsanov

Description

Alexander Genis considers his cities to be Riga, where he grew up, and New York, where since 1977 he has lived and worked — at a newspaper (The New American), at Radio Liberty, and above all in his study. Having divided his life between the writing desk (Dovlatov and Surroundings) and the dining table (Kolobok), between the Old World (6 Fingers) and the New (American Alphabet), between East (Ticket to China) and West (The Wanderer), between literature (Ivan Petrovich Has Died) and art (Candy Wrappers), Genis in his books persistently elevates narrative non-fiction to that summit where it simply becomes literature, carving out a special place for itself. Written with passion and humor, Reading Lessons serves as a detailed guide to extracting pleasure from books. All 35 lessons in literary hedonism are vivid, engaging, and useful. Having mastered them, everyone will graduate from the school of reading which, in Genis's firm conviction, promises "universally accessible, everyday happiness — for all and free of charge."

Contents:

Literary Hedonism
1. The Beginning
2. The Scale of Language
3. Books of the Dead
4. Written as Heard
5. The Dispute
6. Place and Time
7. The Wanderer. Difficult Books
8. Summer Reading
9. Speaking of God
10. To the Pencil
11. As and Like
12. Phlogiston
13. The Archaeology of Laughter
14. Travel Notes
15. The Spirit on Horseback
16. When God Is Lowercase
17. Svoe, no chuzhoe
18. The Thick and the Thin
19. Contact
20. The Peripatetic
21. The Living Corpse
22. Gentrification
23. Fact
24. 2012
25. The Dissident
26. Old and Young
27. DNA
28. Amarcord
29. In One's Own Words
30. Castalia
31. Shibboleth
32. Simply Prose
33. Cathay
34. Christening
35. The End