How the book is a metabook

Like MLA(Modern Language Association)'s guidelines for bibliography, the author too has one.

David Shields, How Literature saved my Life. In later chapters, when it comes to his `Fifty-five works Iswear by', take for example:

Borges, Other Inquisitions. An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.

In a strange way this note resonates with the book too with its web like miscellany and the `otherness' apparent in the quest of unifying the search in the many books.

If you look at life through the lens of death (lens of the book), everything would seem trivial. But still the trivial is not left unexamined. In between this apathy and scrutiny falls the authors study not limited to books but also to failed public heroes, Brown university, fictional superheroes.

A book about many books and writers. How other writers deal with death.The author is a self proclaimed ambivalent. Literature is his saviour and then its not. With his vast reading, the author is able to quote from a variety of sources. Sometimes the quotes steal the show. Sometimes they are out of place.

Many books mentioned in the book like ` This is not a novel', a book according to the author almost entirely out of other writers' lines. Atleast that book has the pleasure of recognition of the passages included. If we rdid `Wait don't tell me `for everything in the book it wouldn't be too fun. So even though there is the humility of not knowing much of the work alluded to in the book, the author has trapped himself into a construct like a never ending story where the magic is supposed to be in the million mirroring of a mostly empty diorama box.

One strength of the book is that even though no lines will stick with you. If you flip the pages, because of the miscellany, the aptness will hit your radar sometime.

The writer does achieve the `dubiety of the first person pronoun' that he wants to achieve by making the reader wonder if he/she is in between quotations.

Things I didn't know
Scout belt can be bought
How Tree of Codes book was made
Collage books

3/5