Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books by Michael Dirda

Ephemeral woolgathering loosely related to books

Michael Dirda is a literary critic who has published several books, but he’s mostly known as a book reviewer for various periodicals, most notably The Washington Post Book World. From February 2012 to February 2013, Dirda wrote a weekly column, entitled Browsings, for the website of The American Scholar magazine. The book Browsings, published in 2015, collects the 52 posts Dirda wrote for that blog over the course of those twelve months.

What sets Dirda apart from most book reviewers these days is his love for old books by dead guys. He’s not one of those critics who thinks that literature was invented in 1950. Dirda is particularly interested in books published from 1860 to 1930, what he calls “The Great Age of Storytelling.” He often celebrates forgotten fiction in the genres of science fiction, horror, and mystery. Dirda is a professed Anglophile who doesn’t seem to have any interest in literature that’s not of British or American origin. Dirda is also a book collector and asserts that books aren’t really books unless they’re printed on paper, which is where he and I differ. I think the content is more important than the packaging, but Dirda admits he’ll buy three editions of the same book just because he likes the different bindings.

The Browsings columns were not intended to be book reviews in the standard sense, but rather more personal reflections from a book lover. The only stipulation set for the column was that the articles be somehow book-related, but in the writings collected here, Dirda often wanders outside even those wide parameters. The reason I would read a book about books is to learn about unfamiliar books that I might be interested in reading. Given Dirda’s profession as a book reviewer and literary critic, that’s not an unreasonable expectation, but Browsings really doesn’t yield much enlightenment of that sort. Instead, Dirda wanders farther afield to deliver articles about penmanship, paper stock, and grading papers (Dirda teaches college courses). In one column, he rants about a bad experience he had visiting Rocky Mountain National Park. In another, he complains about the poor service he gets from his local electricity provider. Who wants to read about that, and why would The American Scholar publish it? A typical chapter in this book, however, proceeds thusly: Dirda travels to a literary conference of some kind. While there, he visits three or four used bookstores, and here is a list of what he bought. Then you get a rapid fire stream of obscure author names and book titles, with almost no information on what those books are about or why Dirda likes them. The fact that Dirda likes them is supposed to be enough to satisfy you.

As the author of the Old Books by Dead Guys blog, I see Dirda as me taken to extremes. We both write about old books in the hopes of inspiring readers to give them a try. In my case, it’s a casual hobby. Dirda, however, eats, breathes, and sleeps this stuff 24/7, and somehow manages to make a living off of doing it. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for his lit-crit, but there’s nothing in these columns that would merit such accolades. For me, reading Browsings was a kind of warning cry of what I might become if I take this book habit too seriously: an annoying know-it-all who comes across as pretentious even when writing about so-called “lowbrow” popular literature that’s supposed to be fun. Maybe Dirda writes great reviews for The Washington Post or The New York Review of Books, but I found little of value to be gleaned from his Browsings.