Book Review: "Around the World in 80 Books" by David Damrosch

Here we are again, books about reading books. One of my favourite genres in the world to slip in between my fiction and nonfiction reading now and again. Recently, I have read many actually - released a short while back was my review on Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher. I have also read A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel, Bookworm by Lucy Mangan and the brilliant book I released a review on some time ago, Amy Jeffs' Storyland. The point is, stories are what makes us human. We tell stories about everything from what we ate for dinner to when the first leather jackets were invented. When someone else tells me about their love for reading and their favourite books, I listen with great intensity. And I think that may be why I like reading these books as well. I love people who have a passion for books.

This book is entitled Around the World in 80 Books and starts rightly off with a briefly prologue on the book by Jules Verne from where it gets its name. Revealing itself as a better to Harold Bloom's Western Canon - this book is filled with novels, poetry and diaries etc. from all over the world and from many different ages. Starting off in the city of London, we take a world history tour through Paris, Brazil, Columbia, India, Guatemala and many more. Let me take you through the parts I found most poignant in the book.

First of all, I loved the opening chapter which introduces us to the city of London with the great, but short novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Damrosch talks to us about the significance of this book presenting this almost paranoia about the war that has just left London, from the symbolism of the plane-writing overhead to the PTSD suffering character. He moves carefully into Dickens' London with one amazing novel, Great Expectations. Normally regarded as one of the greatest English novels, the author takes us on a tour of Dickens' brilliance before setting off once again into a different London - yet the same city.

When we come to Paris, I have to say that I love the book he chose to start off with - Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has to be one of my favourite French novels ever. Long as it is brilliant, the author shows us around Proust's locations - imagined and real (and even a place that was renamed in real life because of the book Proust wrote!) There are few novels that have had such an effect on me and I was glad it was included in the mass of the book.

Poland is another chapter I loved - the chapter on Krakow. When the author mentions that his own family would have had a very different ending if they had stayed in Poland (namely the Holocaust), this really does touch the reader in a different way. You realise how everything is a chain reaction, even literature. Literature was a means of getting the stories out and through various poems by Czeslaw Milosz and others, we can see that Polish poetry should really take the world stage.

Within the chapter concerning Columbia, the author has some wise words of analysis on the book 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the meaning of the text. I can say the same for The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima (even though I would have chosen The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea instead). All in all, this author shows a brilliance in his worldly appreciation of literature - and a case to add some to a growing TBR.