Readings and Ramblings

This is one very long book and the fact that it has 1053 pages does not quite tell you how long it really is. By that I mean that there is a lot, a whole lot, on each of those 1053 pages. It took me about two months to read the whole thing and a few times I was tempted to quit simply because it took so long. I read it differently from the way I expect that most other people would though. It is a reference book and I expect that most people will read it like a reference book. That is, they will use it to look up some particular author for research purposes or because they want to know something about the author and if they browse they will stop and read an entry here and there and not try to read the whole thing. The way I read the book, though, was to read the whole thing from beginning to end.
It is something of an encyclopedia of authors. Each entry consists of some brief biographical notes like where the author went to school and what kind of employment the author has had and the dates of these events. That is followed by a bibliography of the author. Then, in most entries, there is a first person commentary by the author on his or her own writings. Then there is a third person essay on the writings of the author. Then the next entry begins. I did not count the number of authors listed, but there are a lot. Even so, though, I did note some glaring omissions. There were also a lot of authors I never heard of and a lot of those sound quite interesting. If you want to find out about new authors to try out this book just might be the one for you.