Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (28 page)

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Authors: Wendy Lesser

Village Life, A
(Glück)

Volokhonsky, Larissa

Wahlöö, Per

War and Peace
(Tolstoy)

“Waste Land, The” (Eliot)

West, Rebecca

“When I Was Mortal” (Marías)

White Lioness
(Mankell)

Whitman, Walt

Wilder, Thornton

Wild Iris, The
(Glück)

Wild Sheep Chase, A
(Murakami)

Williams, William Carlos

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The
(Murakami)

Wings of the Dove, The
(James)

Wire, The
(TV series)

Wizard of Oz, The
(Baum)

Woes of the True Policeman
(Bolaño)

Wolff, Tobias

Wolf Hall
(Mantel)

Woman in White, The
(Collins)

Woolf, Virginia

Wordsworth, William

Your Face Tomorrow
(Marías)

ALSO BY WENDY LESSER

Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets

Room for Doubt

The Pagoda in the Garden
(a novel)

Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering

The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters

A Director Calls

Pictures at an Execution

His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art

The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History

Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography
(editor)

The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues
(editor)

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy Lesser is founder and editor of
The Threepenny Review
. She is the author of eight previous books of nonfiction and one novel. Her most recent book is the prizewinning
Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen String Quartets
. She has written for
The New York Times Book Review
,
The London Review of Books
,
The Times Literary Supplement
, and other publications. She divides her time between Berkeley, California, and New York City.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lesser, Wendy.

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books / Wendy Lesser.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-374-28920-1 (hardback)

1. Books and reading. 2. Lesser, Wendy—Books and reading. 3. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title.

Z1003 .L543 2014

028'.9—dc23