A Feeling for Books

Deftly melding ethnography cultural history literary criticism and autobiographical reflection <i>A Feeling for Books</i> is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and later as a professor of literature she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as <i>Marjorie Morningstar</i> and <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>. Rich and rewarding this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.