Quotes by Michael Dirda

Despite the rising popularity of the downloadable e-text, I still care about physical books, gravitate to handsome editions and pretty dust jackets, and enjoy seeing rows of hardcovers on my shelves. Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information. I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life.

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

Many readers simply cant stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

To my mind, Dear Brutus stands halfway between Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapines Into the Woods. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

Halloween isnt the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winters tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, J. M. Barries Peter Pan - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchards gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that theyve loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

Its a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ghost story time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents Code.

The Admirable Crichton is probably Barries most famous work after Peter Pan, nearly a pendant to that classic.

Every summer, I regret that I didnt become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! Youll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth.

With any luck, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good cafe in one corner, serving dark beer and kielbasa to keep up ones strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victorias Secret catalogs.

In truth, Im not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only pet Ive ever really loved.

For years, I meant to read Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesigers account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabias Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.

I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so Im not going to diss them. But you dont really have any guarantees that what youre reading wasnt written out of friendship or spite.

Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If Im reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.