{"product_id":"leave-me-alone-im-reading-isbn-9780375709036","title":"Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this delightful memoir, the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air reflects on her life as a professional reader. Maureen Corrigan takes us from her unpretentious girlhood in working-class Queens, to her bemused years in an Ivy League Ph.D. program, from the whirl of falling in love and marrying (a fellow bookworm, of course), to the ordeal of adopting a baby overseas, always with a book at her side. Along the way, she reveals which books and authors have shaped her own life—from classic works of English literature to hard-boiled detective novels, and everything in between. And in her explorations of the heroes and heroines throughout literary history, Corrigan’s love for a good story shines.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Irresistible. . . . Corrigan has some wonderful insights. . . . Book lovers will  be busy checking her lists, searching for new ‘leave me alone’ titles.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington  Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Corrigan’s eclectic taste and skillful assessment of new writers  as well as those long dead are particularly astute.” —\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] brilliant and  funny narrative of [Corrigan’s] own reading life, which ranges from her Catholic  childhood to graduate school and a career as a professional reader. . . . Utterly  original.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Corrigan is erudite without being the least bit pretentious.  . . . Dipping into \u003ci\u003eLeave Me Alone, I’m Reading\u003c\/i\u003e is a little like visiting that friend  whose house is always full of books and who always sends you home with one you’re  excited to read.”—\u003ci\u003eDetroit Free-Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaureen Corrigan is the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Her reviews and essays have  appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Village  Voice\u003c\/i\u003e, and other publications. Winner of an Edgar Award for criticism, Corrigan also  regularly writes a mystery column for \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e and teaches literature  at Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter,  both avid readers.\u003c\/p\u003eCHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ain't No Mountain High Enough:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Women's Extreme-Adventure Stories\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    (and One of My Own)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Among the many dangers of being an obsessive reader is that you tend   to mediate your life through books, filter your experiences through   plots, so that the boundary between fiction and fact becomes porous.   One evening, during the years I was living as a graduate student in   Philadelphia, I was watching TV when a commercial for the local   electric company came on. The commercial was promoting a program to   help addled senior citizens keep track of their bills. On the screen   was an elderly man sitting at a dining room table, staring at a pile   of windowed envelopes. He looked a little bit like my dad, and sure   enough, as the screen widened out to include the rest of the room,   there was a big black-and-white photograph of my father as a toddler,   dressed in a sailor suit, surrounded by his two older sisters and   their parents. \"Oh, there's the photograph,\" I thought to myself. I   had a framed copy in my living room--all the Corrigans and their   descendants have a copy of that photograph hanging somewhere in their   homes. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAside from being a striking image--my grandfather with his   handlebar mustache staring soberly into the camera; my grandmother in   a long dark dress with a lace collar, holding my dad on her lap; my   two aunts, smiling, one in a First Communion dress--it was a picture   occasioned by tragedy. My grandmother Margaret had been diagnosed   with cancer, and she and my grandfather John had the photograph taken   to help the children remember her. She died in 1925, when my father   was five years old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Oh, there's the photograph.\" It took me at least a full minute to   realize that the Corrigan-family photograph was on TV. I was like   those American soldiers described in Dispatches, Michael Herr's great   book about Vietnam, who, as they ran into enemy fire, shouted \"Cover   me!\"--a line they'd absorbed from countless World War II movies. I,   too, had gone to a lot of movies and watched too much TV. My   fuzziness in distinguishing between reality and simulacrum was a   postmodern condition shared by all of us who'd come of age in the   culture of spectacle. But in my case, books were the worst   troublemakers when it came to wreaking havoc with my head. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom   adolescence on, at least, I've read my life in terms of fiction, and   so that evening, when I saw a personal object from my life turn up in   a TV commercial, it seemed, at first, natural. (By the way, after   calling the electric company's public-relations office, I learned   that the photograph had been found in a secondhand-furniture store on   Arch Street in Philadelphia. The location made sense. The one-two   punch of my grandmother's death followed by the Great Depression a   few years later knocked the Corrigan family down. House and car   disappeared and my grandfather John, taking advantage of the first   month's free rent offered by desperate landlords, moved with the   children into a series of apartments in West Philadelphia. A lot of   family treasures, like the photograph, were put into storage, never   to be rescued.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My Catholic girlhood, my school days, my first forays into dating,   college and graduate school, tortured love affairs, jobs, teaching,   marriage--all these events had been mirrored in, even anticipated by,   the books I read. When I worked in a five-and-ten during the latter   part of high school, I thought of myself as young David Copperfield   wasting away in the blacking factory. When I found myself marooned,   night after night, in a one-room graduate-school apartment that   basically consisted of a bay window and some linoleum, I thought of   myself as Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, trapped in glass. Jo March,   Holden Caulfield, Lucky Jim, Nancy Drew, Elizabeth Bennet--I thought   of myself, at one time or other, as all of them . . . and still do.   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut, then, at the age of forty-three, after at least three decades of   understanding my life through literary analogues--indeed, sometimes   shaping my life in the image of fiction--I arrived at a crucial   moment that I couldn't \"read\" through books. To return to the   \"Wrong-Way\" Corrigan metaphor, I felt as though I were flying blind.   For years leading up to the moment I received that life-changing   phone call from the adoption agency, I had been living a classic   version of the female extreme-adventure tale--a veiled narrative that   I had begun to recognize as an essential component of many women's   stories, old and new. By the time that realization dawned, however, I   was about to set out on another kind of adventure altogether.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The traditionally male extreme adventure has been the trend in   nonfiction writing--apart from autobiographies--for roughly the past   decade. I can make this pronouncement with confidence because I must   get one or two new specimens of this kind of book delivered to my   house every week. Jon Krakauer contributed to the increasing demand   for this genre of saved-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth new journalism with   his two bestsellers Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Sebastien   Junger's superb book, The Perfect Storm, is, perhaps, the apotheosis   of this genre, which, as yet, shows no signs of waning popularity   with he-man first-person sagas about polar explorations, solo   round-the-world sails, rodeo riding, and firefighting steadily   muscling their way into bookstores along with more scholarly works   like Nathaniel Philbrick's award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, a   true-life saga about the whale ship Essex that inspired Melville's   better-known fictional extreme-adventure tale, Moby-Dick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The traditional extreme-adventure story is a one-shot testosterone   expenditure of physical courage that pits man against   nature\/man\/himself, with man (the narrator usually) left standing,   bloody but unbowed, amidst the wreckage of his fancy sporting gear.   Scale the mountain; weather the storm at sea (or not); fight the war,   the fire, the flood; carry out manifest destiny; be the first to fly   over the ocean or to the moon; climb down into volcanoes and Egyptian   tombs; or simply learn to survive with the intestinal fortitude of a   Crusoe, Kurtz, or Leatherstocking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Granted, there have always been women, real and fictive, who've   grabbed the spotlight by playing boys' rough games by boys' rules.   These women enter the fray with gusto, but they never stray so far   out of the gender borders that they're dismissed as freaks. That most   famous of all woman warriors, Joan of Arc, would have really shaken   things up if she had led her armies in female dress; outfitted as an   honorary male, she reaffirmed the militaristic status quo--although   even that sartorial sleight of hand didn't save her from the stake.   Harriet Tubman, \"the Mother of the Underground Railroad,\" made solo   rescue missions to the South every winter for a decade after she   herself escaped from slavery. Armed with a pistol and her nerves of   steel, she led more than a hundred slaves to freedom in Canada and   then went on to serve as a Union spy during the Civil War. Because   her missions in both arenas were clandestine and largely   undocumented, the specific details of most of Tubman's astonishing   exploits have been lost to history. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAviatrixes Amelia Earhart and   Beryl Markham also wore men's clothes when they flew off to distant   horizons, but out of the cockpit they made sure they were   photographed in ladylike costumes. (The lithe Earhart never looked as   ungainly as she did in those trumpet skirts and heels she trussed   herself up in for public appearances.) Then there's my personal   favorite female buccaneer, Nellie Bly. I first learned about the   turn-of-the-century \"mother\" of investigative stunt journalism by   reading a juvenile biography of her that was shelved (improbably) in   the makeshift library at St. Raphael's School. I remember being so   excited to find out there was such a woman--a journalist who made her   living by writing (like I dreamed of doing) who also lived a life of   adventure (like every kid dreams of doing). Bly first made a name for   herself by posing as a deranged immigrant woman and getting herself   committed to New York's infamous Blackwell's Island. Only her editor   knew of her exploit; if he had suffered, say, a fatal heart attack   while Bly was buried in Blackwell's, she might have spent the rest of   her life there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But Bly was rescued, and her first-person account of the horrendous   treatment of Blackwell's inmates, some of whom were locked away   simply because they couldn't speak English, predated Geraldo Rivera's   expose of Willowbrook State School by some six decades. In 1889 Bly   went on to best the record of Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg by   traveling around the world in a breathless seventy-two days. The   famous picture of her from that trip shows a pretty, wasp-waisted   young woman, demurely outfitted in checked traveling skirt and jacket   and carrying a carpetbag. Bly might have circled the globe   unchaperoned, but she did so properly cloaked in the protective   mantle of late-Victorian ladyhood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then there are the early-twentieth-century sports marvel Babe   Didrikson Zaharias, and that blond and glamorous \"just one of the   boys\" photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Other standouts are the   African plantation owner Isak Dinesen and World War I nurse and   outspoken women's rights advocate Vera Brittain, both of whose   autobiographies (Brittain's mournful Testament of Youth particularly)   inspired me when I discovered them in my early twenties. Strangely,   in fiction as opposed to real life, female daredevils are scarcer;   furthermore, the ones that do exist are almost exclusively the   product of male writers' imaginations and their risk-taking is   usually erotic in nature. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1722, three years after he created the   ur-survivor, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe gave readers Moll   Flanders, whose picaresque adventures as a prostitute, society lady,   thief, and convict he tried to pass off as a true-life   autobiographical account. Flanders was a kind of eighteenth-century   reincarnation of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer's immortal gap-toothed,   much-married sensualist. Shakespeare's Cleopatra also insinuates   herself into this hip-swiveling sorority of literary Mae Wests, as   do, I suppose, William Makepeace Thackeray's Becky Sharp and Henry   James's and Edith Wharton's bevy of more pallid social adventuresses   such as Daisy Miller, Undine Spragg, Madame Merle, and Lily Bart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Bronte sisters' far less curvaceous creations--Jane Eyre,   Catherine Earnshaw, Shirley--outrageously defy convention, but with   the possible exception of Jane's flight from her aborted wedding to   (the still-married) Rochester in which she stumbles through a storm   on the moor, their physical adventures don't really qualify, in the   traditional sense, as \"extreme.\" Jane Austen's Catherine Morland, the   impressionable young heroine of Northanger Abbey, wanders, every   other page or so, into secret passages and ghostly chambers, but this   Gothic novel is too much of a send-up, too much on the order of   Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, to seriously qualify as an   \"adventure.\" In fact, with the exception of Nancy Drew, who was the   initial creation of a man, Edward Stratemeyer, but whose series life   and escapades were sustained throughout the next two decades by women   writers, I can't think of very many other female-authored women of   adventure in fiction--certainly not before the onset of the Second   Women's Movement, and even then . . . who?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The thought of Nancy Drew reminds me that the two places where   swashbucklers in skirts have long thrived have been in the   \"can't-get-no-respect\" genres of juvenile and detective fiction. The   juvenile-fiction connection makes sense: before the fall into   adolescence, it's easier for girls to get away with acting as   tomboys. There's Astrid Lindgren's fearless anarchist, Pippi   Longstocking, Dorothy from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of   Oz, Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline, and the whole fairy-tale crowd of   female high-wire acts--Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Fa Mu   Lan--many of whom have been gussied up and diminished into   girly-girls by Disney.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlmost from its very inception, detective   fiction has sanctioned curious women to gamble with their lives and   enjoy the male thrills of exploring the unknown and hunting down   prey. A relentless quest for fresh variations on the old formula   certainly had something to do with the literary introduction of   female detectives, especially in the pulp serials. Maybe the fact   that most crime stories end up restoring and affirming the prevailing   social order also gave mysteries more leeway to experiment with   unconventionally daring heroines: to all appearances, at the end of   these tales, everyone--victims, criminals, and detective--is put back   in their proper place. With few exceptions, the careers of many   turn-of-the-century female detectives ended in marriage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The fact that many detecting women have been figured as \"unawakened\"   adolescents like Nancy Drew or \"over-the-hill\" busybodies like Miss   Marple has also made them less threatening to the status quo. Sure,   there has always been the occasional married female snoopster--Agatha   Christie's Tuppence (of the twinkly Tommy and Tuppence series) or   Dashiell Hammett's Nora Charles (hitched to fellow boozehound   Nick)--but they're deviations from the norm. Until feminism   electroshocked the formula in the 1970s, the prevailing attitude   toward female sleuths was most eloquently voiced by Sam Spade in The   Maltese Falcon. Congratulating his secretary and part-time detecting   partner, Effie Perine, on an assignment she's just completed, Spade   rasps, \"You're a damned good man, sister.\"1 In other words, to be a   credible detective, a woman had to become an honorary man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I've loved reading about the exploits of many of these female   adventurers, real and fictive, and relished the opportunity to   (vicariously) compete, swagger, and spit alongside the boys, as they   do. Maybe because I read so many new novels written by women and   because I have a scholarly background in the nineteenth-century   British novel--a genre in which women more than held their own with   their male contemporaries--I began to think about the existence of a   specifically female variant of the extreme-adventure tale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe female   extreme-adventure tale, as I was beginning to discern it about eight   years ago, was light on feats of derring-do and braggadocio, heavy on   anxious waiting and endurance. The precarious situations described in   these female extreme-adventure stories--childbirth, unwanted   pregnancies, abortions (legal and illegal), abusive relationships,   fatiguing caregiving--are ones that are faced almost exclusively by   women. Their physical ordeals are augmented or even outweighed by   heavy emotional burdens. Much space is devoted in these stories to   the value of a woman quietly keeping her nerve through   hours--sometimes years--of strain. And above all, it's the quotidian   quality of their pain that separates the women from the boys.   Blinding blizzards and numbing frostbite, such as Jon Krakauer   describes, last for a few hours, maybe days, and then, one way or   another, the nightmare is over. In contrast, the torments particular   to women's extreme-adventure tales continue year after year. Climbing   Everest looks like a snap compared with waking up every morning to,   say, the enervating prospect of attending to an elderly invalid   parent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was really struck by the idea of a \"women's only\" version of the   extreme-adventure tale in the course of reviewing Anna Quindlen's   1998 novel, Black and Blue, for The New York Times. Around the same   time, like millions of other readers, I'd caught extreme-adventure   fever from reading Krakauer's books and The Perfect Storm.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302956978405,"sku":"NP9780375709036","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375709036_ecd79c3e-6a1b-43f1-959a-92b9ad9bc5cd.jpg?v=1767731248","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/leave-me-alone-im-reading-isbn-9780375709036","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}