I found this book at a University Womens book sale last year, stuck it on the shelf and forgot about it. Picked from my bookcase at random recently, I found it richly rewarding in its essays about parents, the "sandwich" generation, getting older, marriage and death, among other things. As a booklover I especially enjoyed the chapter, "Books," where Atlas confesses to an addiction to books, many of which he admires but never reads or finishes. He also admits he no longer feels guilty about all the Great Books and classics that he's never read, and what's more, simply doesn't care. I marked a few books he referenced, and looked them up, one being Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading. But after looking that one up, it didn't sound like a book I could easily relate to, with its emphasis on fantasy and scifi stuff. But who knows? Maybe I'll try it one day. He also admits having forgotten much of what he read feverishly in his college days, although random lines and quotations will float across his consciousness at times.

Perhaps the chapter that intrigued me most here was the one on "money." I think of Atlas as a reasonably successful writer, who has published several books and worked for The NY Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. He runs his own publishing house (Atlas and Company), owns an apartment in NYC and a country home in Vermont, and yet he characterizes himself as (and I had to stop, think and chuckle at this) "lower upper middle class." He also dreads paying his bills, particularly all those credit card purchases of stuff he'd even forgotten he'd bought, and seemed resigned to living in debt. So what's with this guy? Can't he manage his money? Or is there simply never enough, no matter how much you make? But then I thought again, of how I'd never heard of James Atlas before reading this book, so maybe he's not so rich after all. I mean even I can publish a book - and have - but I certainly haven't made any money at it, so ...

But I LIKE this guy. A biographer of modest successes, he claims to have failed as a fiction writer, but when I researched the one novel listed among his books, The Great Pretender, it sounded pretty damned interesting. In fact, I think I'll try to read it. This was, all in all, a very thoughtful and extremely well-written book about, well about, to use an overworked cliche, 'the human condition.' Once again, this James Atlas guy is yet another writer I'd love to sit and have coffee with while we talked about books. ( )