Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”

“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”

“We go to literature because it houses human lives.” So writes Arnold Weinstein in his hybrid memoir-criticism pilgrimage of a life spent in books. I have written that the “unread life isn’t worth living.” In opening the pages of books, we find characters and faces so near yet so distant, some real, other imaginary. Yet they touch our lives. Why? Literature does not just house human lives. Literature often houses our own lives in some manner and allows us to encounter new lives—and perhaps become those lives—in the pages we open and turn through.

Arnold Weinstein’s book comes at a time when the humanities is suffering in the department of public perception. The triumph of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), which Weinstein does mention in his book, garners all the prestige. In our hectic busy-busy-busy lives that are always on the move, whether physically from one place to the next or digitally from one app to another, books are often an afterthought. Not enough time for that is the common thought that glances through most minds. Weinstein, however, argues the opposite; books give us time that has been stolen from us by the pillars of modernity: “We enter the bookstore, see all the books arrayed there, and think: so many books, so little time; but the truth goes the other way: books do not take time, they give time.”

The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing is a unique book. As mentioned, it is part memoir and part literary criticism. The story being told is Arnold Weinstein’s. Yet in opening the pages of a book about (and by) Arnold Weinstein, we find ourselves in him, and we become him in this journey through the pages of a personal, and literary, odyssey. This, I believe, is the majesty of reading—and I think Weinstein agrees. We find ourselves in books; we also become others in books.