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By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published September 18, 2005

LEAVE ME ALONE, I'M READING:

Finding and Losing Myself in Books

By Maureen Corrigan

Random House, $24.95, 201 pp

Maureen Corrigan and I have a lot in common: Female baby boomers from working-class Irish Catholic backgrounds, we have both happily let books shape our lives in countless ways.

And I identified instantly with the title of her memoir: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books.

But you don't need to be Corrigan's double to enjoy this thoughtful, sometimes surprising and always charming story of a life among books.

Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University and reviews books for the Washington Post, New York Times and other newspapers. But she may be most familiar as the voice reviewing books on NPR's excellent interview show Fresh Air.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading is neither an academic analysis nor a review. It's one woman's look at the books that have shaped her life, her sense of herself, her work ethic, her marriage and motherhood.

Her list of books is not meant to be a canon or syllabus, and her explication of them is purely personal. Jane Eyre, Nancy Drew and a host of Catholic martyrs share the pages with Corrigan's warm memories of her bookworm father, her harrowing story of fertility treatments and, eventually, her joyful adoption of a daughter.

Some of the books Corrigan writes about are classics - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon - while others are genre fiction, biographies or children's books.

Corrigan groups them into thematic chapters on religion, romance, work and what she calls the women's extreme-adventure story.

Boys and men, she says, often relish books about physical extreme adventures, from Robinson Crusoe to Into Thin Air. Girls and women learn somewhat different lessons from such books as The Miracle Worker or Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue, a novel about a woman escaping an abusive husband.

Where adventure books for guys teach derring-do and physical courage, women's extreme emotional adventures focus on such virtues as self-sacrifice and endurance. "Climbing Everest looks like a snap compared with waking up every morning to, say, the enervating prospect of attending to an elderly invalid parent."

But Corrigan never limited her reading to prescribed girls' books, in childhood or adulthood. She writes thrillingly about her discovery, while grinding through writing a dissertation on "Victorian gloom-and-doom social critics," of Hammett's Red Harvest, "the voice in the wilderness: smart, tough, direct, and sassy." It's just one of many examples of the right book showing up in her life at the right time.

Her love for hard-boiled mysteries shaped her own work ethic, and, divide between high art and low be damned, she gracefully ties them to the teachings of artist-philosopher John Ruskin: "Labor without art is brutality and art without labor is guilt."

In her chapter on romance, Corrigan brings fresh ideas to standards like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, but she finds a real model for her own marriage in Dorothy Sayers' wonderful Gaudy Night, ostensibly part of the Lord Peter Wimsey series but really a book about his love interest, Harriet Vane, and her independent professional life in a women's college.

Corrigan's reading is both wide and deep, and she is erudite without being the least bit pretentious. For many readers, her memoir will evoke memories of long-forgotten books (Holy cow! The Beany Malone books are still in print!) and make them hungry for those they may not have read.

Dipping into Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading is a little like visiting that friend whose house is full of books and who always sends you home with one you're excited about reading. If you don't have a friend like that, Corrigan is ready to help.

-- Colette Bancroft is a Times staff writer.

[Last modified September 17, 2005, 09:00:06]