Judging a Book By Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere

Author:  Lauren Leto

Year: 2012

Publisher:  Harper Perennial

Pages:  269

Goodreads Summary:

Want to impress the hot stranger at the bar who asks for your take on Infinite Jest? Dying to shut up the blowhard in front of you who’s pontificating on Cormac McCarthy’s “recurring road narratives”? Having difficulty keeping Francine Prose and Annie Proulx straight?

For all those overwhelmed readers who need to get a firm grip on the relentless onslaught of must-read books to stay on top of the inevitable conversations that swirl around them, Lauren Leto’s Judging a Book by Its Lover is manna from literary heaven! A hilarious send-up of—and inspired homage to—the passionate and peculiar world of book culture, this guide to literary debate leaves no reader or author unscathed, at once adoring and skewering everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Ayn Rand to Dostoyevsky and the people who read them.

This was a fun little book. I saw myself in so many of the types of readers and in reader behaviors. I kept thinking all through this book, "Yep, that's me." or "Oh, I do that." I thoroughly enjoyed this and it read a lot quicker than I expected.