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How Literature Saved My Life David Shields 9780307961525 Books

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How Literature Saved My Life David Shields 9780307961525 Books

Perhaps had I heard of David Shields before reading this book, or if I'd read a previous David Shields book, I would have a better understanding and appreciation of this work. I thought when getting this book, that I was going to read an author and professor's thoughts on life and his experiences through literature.

What this book is, however, is David Shields's musings regarding lots of little things. There are his thoughts regarding films such as, Laura, starring Clifton Webb. There are thoughts regarding he and his sister watching TV in the 60s. There are many thoughts of sex and authors he enjoys, and his father and his education and his stutter. They are like mini essays of this travails and studies of different things. And That's it.

I have my own thoughts and opinions and various musings and understandings, but I am not sure everyone would be interested if I were to write them and publish them-especially what I think of minor films or actors, or even what my brother and I watched on TV. (I liked That Girl and he liked Star Trek and Big Time Wrestling. We came together regarding Creature Features on Friday nights and ate bananna splits). Fascinating? Perhaps not to the average Joe.

So, if I knew David Shields prior to reading this, I might find his musings highly entertaining and enlightening. Since I really don't know him from Adam, it was all kind of a lightly amusing, half-way interesting read.


Tags : How Literature Saved My Life [David Shields] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, and painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature.</b> Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography,David Shields,How Literature Saved My Life,Knopf,0307961524,Books & Reading,Essays,Personal Memoirs,Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).,Literature;Philosophy.,Mortality in literature.,Biography & Autobiography,Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs,BiographyAutobiography,Books And Reading,Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.),Literary Collections Essays,Literary Criticism Books & Reading,Literature,Literature - Classics Criticism,Mortality in literature,Philosophy

How Literature Saved My Life David Shields 9780307961525 Books Reviews

Shields says there's no more time in this world for long form fiction. Self reflexive memoir is all that's worth a damn. Concision is paramount .The words that take the reader from here to there are a waste of time. You better be confronting grief, or something seemingly trivial but actually profound, or wrestling with your relationship with you dad, or all of the above--cuz the novel is dead. Disjointed, patchwork, collage is best and that's how How Lit Saved My Life is written. He's honest and erudite and highly quotable of quotables. I underlined a lot. I'm happy I read it but am left feeling a little hostile towards his point of view. I had wanted to tear into the agenda he's trying to put over but maybe I need to meditate on why I feel so threatened instead. I just know I'm not ready to declare fiction slayed and Twitter/Youtube triumphant.
I found David Shields take on life, his irreverence as well as his generosity toward those whom he admires, both interesting and refreshing. I not only ordered his memoir after reading this book, but also other books that he recommends in this volume, somehow trusting him enough by dint of his writing to trust his taste in other writers. I know he is right about Renata Adler, so at least I'm safe there. Oh, and Phillip Lopate recommends him, and I trust Phillip's judgment.
=Sheri Nelson Maclean
The only reason I am giving 4 stars instead of 5 is that many of the discussions were too short. But this is a wonderful analysis of how the books discussed affected Shields. The discussion is so good, the only fault I can find is when he just lists books rather than discussing them, or when he just gives a one sentence review that doesn't tell you very mych. I got many suggestions here for new books to get. Finally, in this electronic age, always good to see someone praise the virtues of reading.
Before picking up this book I was familiar with David Shields, having read "Black Planet," "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You Will Be Dead," and "Reality Hunger" and a few other of his essays. Shields is both brutally honest emotionally and intellectually super-powered; for instance in "Black Planet" he combines a racial study of the NBA along with personal revelations that he imagines that he is as "long and lean" as Gary Payton while having sex with his wife.

In "How Literature Saved My Life" Shields misses his mark. Ostensibly this is a work about - like the title says - how literature saved his life. However, literature really didn't save his life. Like many reviewers, I thought I was headed for a work on the loneliness and alienation of modern society and the redemptive powers of literature. Shields hints at this, but most of this work is about the literature he likes and how most of literature fails him. In fact, he hasn't read much literature since the late 1990's (pg 124). What Shields has been more focused on is the pursuit of a new literary form, one he calls collage, that would exist on the "bleeding edge" of genres between fiction and non-fiction and memoir and essay. These are the books that Shields writes about, the ones he loves, the one he quotes from and recommends. That's a big part of this book - as well as much of this book is an argument why he published "Reality Hunger" which was pretty tiresome since it is not that interesting and not that easy to relate to.

Still, Shields' voice is powerful enough that it kept me intrigued the entire time, and I'm sure this will be a book I reread passages of continually. Shields will deconstruct himself, including the less pleasant parts of himself, with exacting laser vision and leave himself bare to the reader. He has a similar ability to render an entire novel to a single powerful sentence - so much so that even though I have read some of these works I'm left saying "wait that's the point of ___?" I also found it interesting when Shields says that the novel was created to "access interiority" (pg 129) but that social media is catching up and surpassing the novel in this regard.

The sparse nature of the book leaves the short memoir passages that much more powerful. In particular, the essay regarding Tiger Woods and how our strengths and weaknesses are indivisible from one another is particularly fantastic. Shields assembles a murderer's row of thinkers and writers to back his argument. Nabokov, Tolstoy, Pynchon, DF Wallace...quotations by all these writers are here in stripped form, rippling with intellectual power. I was a little surprised with how often the ghost of David Foster Wallace floated across the pages of this manuscript. But since Wallace was primarily concerned with literature as a salve for loneliness, Shields finds much common ground with him, though Shields apparently has no time for Wallace's novels finding that "...the game is not worth the candle." (pg 192). Wait, what? Your time is that valuable?

That's one of the reasons it is so tough for Shields to be representative for all readers when he's quite clearly allergic to plot or any literary devices at all. Shields believes that we are all terminal patients, so writers should just get to the point already. He doesn't want anything between him and the artist - just the artist on an autopsy table, laid bare for Shields to examine. He wants to know the secret of "...how the writer solves being alive."

I agree with Shields on a lot of points; hell, which one of us doesn't want to know how to live? That's what Franzen, an author Shields derided in "Reality Hunger," was examining in his latest book. As Shields tells us, writing should be the "axe to break the frozen sea within us" (Kafka), or the "bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness" (Wallace). At this, Shields only succeeds at moments, glancingly. I don't agree with his argument, and he talks about himself very little. Since most of this book is a a personal literary argument rather than personal memoir, I'm left with not much to connect to. So no matter how strongly he makes his case for collage and for the hollowness of the novel, I can't seem to meet him out on this abyss spanning bridge.
Perhaps had I heard of David Shields before reading this book, or if I'd read a previous David Shields book, I would have a better understanding and appreciation of this work. I thought when getting this book, that I was going to read an author and professor's thoughts on life and his experiences through literature.

What this book is, however, is David Shields's musings regarding lots of little things. There are his thoughts regarding films such as, Laura, starring Clifton Webb. There are thoughts regarding he and his sister watching TV in the 60s. There are many thoughts of sex and authors he enjoys, and his father and his education and his stutter. They are like mini essays of this travails and studies of different things. And That's it.

I have my own thoughts and opinions and various musings and understandings, but I am not sure everyone would be interested if I were to write them and publish them-especially what I think of minor films or actors, or even what my brother and I watched on TV. (I liked That Girl and he liked Star Trek and Big Time Wrestling. We came together regarding Creature Features on Friday nights and ate bananna splits). Fascinating? Perhaps not to the average Joe.

So, if I knew David Shields prior to reading this, I might find his musings highly entertaining and enlightening. Since I really don't know him from Adam, it was all kind of a lightly amusing, half-way interesting read.