Booklist
This joy-filled, reflective collection makes perfect bedside reading. Literate but never snobby, this collection of essays surely will entertain and enlighten book lovers of all stripes.
The New York Times
A
rambunctious personality wanders the aisles of rare-book stores; musing about language, aging and traffic; and catching up with fellow aficionados of the weird and the obscure. The innumerable forgotten books he catalogs are captivating.
Bookslut
Quite simply, Dirda loves books, possibly more than anyone else in the world, and he can make the reader feel that love. Reading Browsings is an unusually joyful endeavor.
Washington Free Beacon
Dirda on literature, whether highbrow or low, is riveting. If there is a young person out there who thinks he would like to have books as a presence in his life: You should buy this volume right away, and learn, with delight, how much more you’d like to know.
Wall Street Journal
Smart but not stuffy, critical but not carping, self-engaged but not self-absorbed.
Dirda’s intellect is a brightly populated curio cabinet, containing topics as varied as Samuel Johnson’s cat, the art of the perfect book title, the decline of penmanship and the distress of writer’s block.
The Washington Post
A set of appealingly conversational meditations on the life of the mind. The author’s personality is so vivid and immediate that a readerly rapport is established almost instantly. The hallmarks of the Dirdanian sensibility includes a wry, slightly avuncular tone that wears its erudition slightly, a pronounced interest in genre fiction, and a sturdy sort of common-sense approach to critical theory, all with a light dusting of loveable curmudgeon and a sprinkle of raffish boulevardier. Cheerfully eccentric, Dirda eschews the lofty pronouncement of Olympian judgment, preferring instead a hale and friendly exploration of shared enthusiasm.
Paste Magazine
The essays of Browsings can often read like (a particularly eloquent and charmingly cordial) fanboy’s ruminations. The friendly, affable Dirda within its pages is enjoyable.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
It’s awfully refreshing, in this Age of Noise, to know that there are still critics like Michael Dirda reading the pages of books old and new. These 52 essays showcase Dirda’s remarkable range of fancy and his indomitable and unabashed joyfulness in the memory of his own reading life. For all their intelligence,
these essays are not pedantic. Rather, they have a sort of plain-spoken elegance about them, one that relies more on a generosity of feeling than on an excess of intellect. Dirda shows that he’s one of the most accessible critics still doing the good work.
Hartford Books Examiner
Ranging in tone from intellectual to sentimental and amusing to poignant, Dirda's vignettes celebrate bibliophilia in all its glory. A literary smorgasbord.
There is much to savor between these pages.
Charleston Post and Courier
As much about a passion for collecting and living with books, about chance discoveries and recoveries of the forgotten, as it is about the inestimable pleasures of reading. Dirda may be as well read as anyone alive.
Open Letters Monthly
Dirda is required reading. Dirda wonderfully captures how this particular browsing very nearly approximates paradise.
Bookreporter
A
witty, informative and amusing book, filled with small treasures of insight that booklovers will retain as a roadmap to future reading adventures. A book that I know I will keep in my collection and enjoy for years to come.
Shelf Awareness
The 52 pieces collected in Browsings shine with Dirda's passion for books, both as a reader and a collector, and are certain to delight any bibliophile. They reveal the mind of a critic with an astonishing breadth of literary knowledge and a talent for sharing that learning in accessible, often humorous, prose.
Larry McMurtry - Harper's Magazine
In remembering and reflecting upon his own first excitements as a reader, Dirda is infectious.
The Times Literary Supplement
Charming.
Bookforum
If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books.
Azar Nafisi
Pleasure,
provocation, passion — just some of the words that came to my mind and through my heart as I perused this book. A reunion with the old forgotten favorite books and an introduction to some dazzling new ones, this is a book to go to bed with, to wake up to, and to browse through in between.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Bibliophiles, bibliomaniacs and bibliophagists will love Browsings. The essays are highly personal, occasionally curmudgeonly, always self-effacing, uniformly informative, sometimes politically lefty, unfailingly affecting. Emily Dickinson famously wrote, 'There is no frigate like a book.' In Browsings, Michael Dirda has constructed a sturdy vessel transporting us to shores that surprise, delight and educate.
Times Literary Supplement
Dirda's enthusiasm is manifest, and his knowledge is often impressive. Dirda's first-person voice and confessional zeal make him an easy author to like.
Dana Gioia
Michael Dirda is one of the great book reviewers of our age. It is not merely that his writing is so lucid and intelligent or that his taste is so inclusive but discerning. The key to his particular magic is that he is always alert to the complex pleasures that animate literature. His engaging essays are those of a restless, omnivorous reader and a true bookman.
Los Angele Review of Books
Elegantly written musings about calligraphy, writer’s block, genre conferences, the books on a given critic’s nightstand, with the odd personal reminiscence thrown in.
Nick Owchar - Los Angeles Times
A brief, elegant reflection. For so many years Dirda has been such an insightful guide to literatures past and present.
Alberto Manguel
Michael Dirda, bookman extraordinaire, has elevated the indulgent pleasures of browsing to the quality of high art. A marvelous collection for serious book lovers, common readers and all of us who take a guilty delight in the gossip of literature.
Wall Street Journal
Smart but not stuffy, critical but not carping, self-engaged but not self-absorbed.
Dirda’s intellect is a brightly populated curio cabinet, containing topics as varied as Samuel Johnson’s cat, the art of the perfect book title, the decline of penmanship and the distress of writer’s block.
Dana Gioia
Michael Dirda is one of the great book reviewers of our age. It is not merely that his writing is so lucid and intelligent or that his taste is so inclusive but discerning. The key to his particular magic is that he is always alert to the complex pleasures that animate literature. His engaging essays are those of a restless, omnivorous reader and a true bookman.
The New York Times
A
rambunctious personality wanders the aisles of rare-book stores; musing about language, aging and traffic; and catching up with fellow aficionados of the weird and the obscure. The innumerable forgotten books he catalogs are captivating.
Booklist
This joy-filled, reflective collection makes perfect bedside reading. Literate but never snobby, this collection of essays surely will entertain and enlighten book lovers of all stripes.
Thomas Mann
Michael
Dirda's witty essays on books and bookishness are as addictive as literary potato chips—you simply cannot stop with just one. Not only do they whet your appetite for the many volumes he so engagingly recommends, they give you a craving for more of Dirda's own quirky personality. He is our own
Montaigne and our Hazlitt. I want more!”
Neil Gaiman
Imagine having a really unbelievably well-read friend, who likes the same stuff that you do but is able to articulate why he loves it so much better than you can. And while explaining it points you at a hundred books and authors you'd love but haven't heard of or have never got around to reading. And who makes you feel, by the end of his explanation, as if you've been inaugurated into a secret society of people who love what can be done with words. That's who Michael Dirda is, and that's what this book does.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Dirda has written a rollicking, erudite, and terrifically beguiling little book. Reading experiences don't get much more captivating than this; nor does literary criticism.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-05-13
Author and literary journalist Dirda (On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, 2011, etc.) presents a collection of light, conversational essays drawn from a year of writing on books and book collecting for the American Scholar. A weekly book columnist for the Washington Post and a regular contributor to numerous periodicals, the Pulitzer Prize recipient champions actual books as opposed to digital texts, for they are not mere home decor but a physical presence: reflections of who one is, "of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know." The author is happiest when enveloped by books, at home or in the many bookstores he trawls for hidden treasures. Browsings is as much about living with books, about serendipitous discovery, as about the boundless pleasures of reading. Dirda is, and encourages us to be, unabashedly promiscuous about books, exploring the realm of letters within and beyond our comfort zones, recognizing that this domain is greater than the bestseller lists, cultivating a taste for the quirky and arcane, and embracing the obscure as readily as the renowned. Though a literary polymath, the author disavows an analytical mind or the appellation "critic" (despite much evidence to the contrary), insisting, "I'm a bookman, an appreciator, a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized, and the forgotten." He does his best to exhume the buried tome, owning a particular bent (of late) toward the period 1865 to 1935, which gave birth to most of our modern genres. His antiquarian penchants extend not only to Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction, but to illustrative quotes from authors in all eras. Dirda's comradely essays are unfailingly informative and amusing, punctuated with poignant asides on the aging artist and paeans to great literary scholars. His almost single-minded passion, the exhilaration of a life in literature, glows on every page.
