Most Interesting Books of 2006
Things That Matter
What Seven Classic Novels
Have to Say About the Stages of Life
by Edward Mendelson
published by Pantheon Books
The Things That Matter is a cause for celebration, for three reasons. Firstly, it may bode a reversal in the foolish academic trend by the Derridadaists, who devalue literature by disconnecting it with the authors who write it, and who swear that books have hardly more intrinsic meaning than the daily headlines or the weekly shopping list. Secondly, Mendelson's work discusses seven books by five women writers — Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf — all of whom deserve to be far better known. And finally, each of the book's chapters contains a profound analysis about not only the novels themselves, but of one facet of our lives: childbirth, childhood, youth, marriage, love, parenthood, and old age. Mendelson's focus on Ms. Woolf — three of the seven chapters are about Woolf's books — is entirely justified. In an introduction to the seven chapters, Mendelson explains his radical perpective, the freshest and healthiest approach to writing in four decades, since The Writer in America by Van Wyck Brooks.
— Michael Pastore
