A Book about Books

This book is part I of III. Only the first part is finished at this time. As the other parts are finished, I will try to publish them. The title and subtitle of this book explain what I want this book to be about, but perhaps there are a few insights I can add. There used to be a PBS television program called the Eleventh Hour, where well-known and lesser known persons who had reached a certain age were given a chance to make a statement, perhaps their final statement, in the form of a lecture from a podium. I feel like this book and its subsequent parts will be my statement. A second and equally important purpose is to try to make a difference. Sometimes there are books that I have only heard about or about which I know only a little. Roger Rosenblatt's book about writing, Unless It Moves the Human Heart, is one such book. He was interviewed on PBS TV by their arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown. This is what Roger said about what writing should be, and I have always remembered it: "To make suffering endurable, to make evil intelligible, to make justice desirable, to make love possible, and ultimately to be useful to the world, and to make the world better." There are also other literary gems in the interview. Finally, another fragment of a book that I have seen is from Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical book, Hunger of Memory, in which he describes his first encounter with books in school, his struggle to make sense of them, and what use to make of them. That particular excerpt also appears in Life Studies: A Thematic Reader (third edition) edited by David Cavitch. I want to share as much as I can of what I've learned from almost fifty years of reading (there will be more reading) certain kinds of books. I hope my book will be of use.