Title: I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life
Author: Anne Bogel
Genre: Nonfiction
Format: eBook
Pages: 161
Dates Read: October 13, 2020
“We are readers. Books grace our shelves and fill our homes with beauty; they dwell in our minds and occupy our thoughts. Books prompt us to spend pleasant hours alone and connect us with fellow readers. They invite us to escape into their pages for an afternoon, and they inspire us to reimagine our lives.”
I’d Rather Be Reading is basically a memoir of Anne Bogel’s reading life. Her muses about reading and the reading life are very relatable. The book consists of short essays/chapters that focus on key parts of reading life. I enjoyed the format and the writing style of the author a lot. It made the book very easy to read, especially with each chapter being a new overall theme.
But while a lot of the chapters and discussions were relatable, I feel that the book gives little else to the reader. It felt like it was missing something, like tips to picking your next book or something like that. Mostly this was just like listening to a fellow book lover discuss their love for books but not actually gaining any useful information along the way. I did still enjoy it though and will probably recommend it to other bookish friends.
“I’m grateful for my one life, but I’d prefer to live a thousand—and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life. A good book allows me to step into another world, to experience people and places and situations foreign to my own day-to-day existence. I love experiencing the new, the novel, the otherwise impossible—especially when I can do it from my own comfy chair.”
Red-Haired Ash Reads 