Monday, July 17, 2023

An Omnivorous Reader

In his online New York Times obituary (June 14, 2023), Robert Gottlieb, the noted book and magazine editor (Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf; The New Yorker), was reported to have said that in his teens he read War and Peace by Tolstoy in one day and Proust's  Remembrance of Things Past, described in the obituary as a "monumental" work, in one week.

As a boy, Gottlieb told the Times in a 1980 article, "I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time. Mind you, that's all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library."

The title of his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader: A Life, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed, is an apt description of his reading habits as a child and as an adult.

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