August 25, 2014
In his fanciful, endearing account of his experiences tackling classic works of fiction, Miller (Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport) conveys his love of reading, though the book is light on literary criticism. At age 40, Miller is married, with a young child, a boring job as an editor, and a deeply stultifying daily routine; he takes his cue for this project from another Miller’s work, written 50 years ago—Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life, in which the author explores his life through an account of the books that influenced him. Here, Miller sets for himself an ambitious reading regimen—50 pages per day—and begins with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which he found inscrutable but enchanting. He plows through works such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, which he had previously began reading but didn’t finish (he doesn’t find them much easier to get through the second time around). Both of these made their way onto his “List of Betterment,” along with Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (“It spoke to me when I was 16”), musician Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler, and others. There is plenty of hilarity in Miller’s intimate literary memoir, including an idiosyncratic comparison between Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.