Dear Match Book: Reading about Reading

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Dear Match Book,

I love reading about readers. Being one is an important part of my identity. It’s what I loved so much about Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot”: Though the protagonist is unsure of who she is, she knows she is a reader.

I’m looking for something that goes beyond the idea that books make us more empathetic and resists simplification, nostalgia and sentimentality.

I’m drawn to collections like Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris,” but I’m open to different kinds of recommendations — both books about reading in general and books written about specific books. Along these lines, I’ve recently read “Poetic Justice,” by Martha Nussbaum; “Beautiful and Pointless,” by David Orr; and “Elizabeth Costello,” by J.M. Coetzee. I like essays, poetry, fiction and popular literary criticism.

Do you have any suggestions for those of us who like books about reading?

SARAH SWONG
NEW YORK

Dear Sarah,

To the uninitiated, reading about reading may sound either dull or too meta, but, as you know, discovering other readers’ insights into such a solitary joy feels thrillingly intimate. Then there are the pleasures found in books about books: glimpses into the stories behind treasured volumes that offer a form of socially acceptable eavesdropping.

Paging All Writers

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s erudite, witty and roving paean to the page, “Ruined by Reading,” includes signs of her own addiction to the printed word — from the early decoding ability that marked her as a reading prodigy to her “phobia for which there is no name, the fear of being interrupted.” Schwartz also incorporates anecdotes from literary history, including an early rejection report on Henry James’s “The Ambassadors,” and some highly personal textual analysis of a vast assortment of writing, from “The Little Mermaid” to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Peter Orner’s “Am I Alone Here?” offers similarly wide-ranging and autobiographical appeal. In Orner’s exhilarating, charmingly self-deprecating memoir-in-books, the relevance of stories reigns. In chapters prefaced with delicate book cover illustrations by his older brother, Eric, Orner weaves twin, overlapping narratives. The stories of his life (fatherhood, divorce, family history) and the work of writers he admires (John Edgar Wideman, Eudora Welty and Robert Walser among them) merge: “It gets me every time,” Orner writes, “the way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

Inside Stories

Three vital books — two works of literary criticism and one unusual book-group chronicle — share an immersive quality: Their writers treat language and stories with a familiarity that amplifies the indivisible connection between literature and life.

The scrim that separates life and art seems particularly delicate in “My Life in Middlemarch,” Rebecca Mead’s moving and reflective analysis of George Eliot’s masterpiece. In “Why Poetry,” Matthew Zapruder approaches the “dream logic” of the form with colloquial ease, making the case that to appreciate verse we must forget “many incorrect things we have learned in school.” Don’t let the title or the astringent tone of Vivian Gornick’s “The End of the Novel of Love” fool you: The essays on figures such as Clover Adams, Jean Rhys and Willa Cather are wildly seductive. And it’s the setting of the congenial “Reading Lolita in Tehran” — mid-1990s Iran — that colors the lens through which the author Azar Nafisi’s students interpret the Persian and Western classics (like “Madame Bovary” and “Pride and Prejudice”) forbidden by their government.

A quartet of books about books gives behind-the-scenes looks at the creation of classics. In “The Story of Charlotte’s Web,” Michael Sims evokes E.B. White’s early and enduring love of animals and other contextual essentials to deepen readers’ appreciation for this heartbreaking story of barnyard friendship. Francine Prose’s “Anne Frank” is foremost an appreciation of the famous diarist’s astonishing writing skills. Aficionados of Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” should pick up Michael Gorra’s utterly unsentimental “Portrait of a Novel,” which mixes biography and history to shed new light on the pages of Isabel Archer’s journey.

A Life in Letters

Your interest in “Elizabeth Costello” reminded me of another fictional woman of letters — Aaliya Saleh, the lonely, fiercely literary, 72-year-old Lebanese narrator of “An Unnecessary Woman,” by Rabih Alameddine. Aaliya, who has (for her own pleasure) translated 37 books into Arabic over a half-century, delivers a long, delightfully digressive, conspiratorial monologue that takes one bookish detour after another. Her “blind lust for the written word” guides the narrative, but it is her observant voice, directly addressing readers, that ultimately convinces: Literature is essential.

Yours truly,
Match Book

Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.

Check out Match Book’s earlier recommendations here.