In Why We Read What We Read, Lisa Adams and John Heath take an insightful and often hilarious tour through nearly 200 bestselling books, ferreting out their persistent themes and determining what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Some of our favorite and revealing topics include

Repeating the Obvious

Diet, Wealth, and Inspiration

Black and White and Read All Over

Good and Evil in Bestselling Adventure Novels and Political Nonfiction

Soul Train

Religion and Spirituality

Hopefully Ever After

Love, Romance and Relationships

Reading for Redemption

Trials and Triumphs in Literary Fiction and Nonfiction

Controversy and Conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code

Explore the nature of what and how we readand what it means for our psyches, our society and our future

Nigel Bryant is head of drama at Marlborough College. He has also provided editions in English of the anonymous thirteenthcentury romance Perlesvaus, published as The High Book of the Grail, and Chretien's Perceval The Story of the Grail.

That A Room of Ones Own embraces narrative is hardly surprising. Woolfs focus in this essay is women and fiction, and specifically the obstacles faced by any woman who would become an artist. And because the obstacles are often insidious, psychological conditions created by a society dominated by men, Woolf in some ways needs to employ her narrative gifts to make these intangible living realities emotionally present to the reader. The lack of opportunities and personal space, the embittering sneers of male writers, and the absence of any kind of familial or institutional support are not presented as ideas but rather as conditions that have asphyxiated aspiring women writers for centuries. In one of the most wellknown sections of the work, Woolf tells the story of Shakespeares sister. It is an imaginative speculation about a woman who perhaps possessed the incomparable native genius of her brother, but who was denied at first the educational opportunities and then the personal opportunities afforded to her brother William. Thwarted by the scornful laughter, disapproval, and limitations of a malecentered world, and afforded no outlets for the expression of her gifts, this woman, Woolf speculates, would have sunk beneath the weight of such conditions into madness or suicide. This personal tragedy, which must have been repeated again and again over the centuries, is compounded by the immense loss to the world of the magnificent and sublime works of art that never had a chance to come into being.

In the essay Woolf also discusses those female writers who did manage to overcome their circumstances and produce works of great and lasting power Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and George Eliot. Yet even in the works of a writer like Charlotte Bronte, whose novels are unquestionably highwater marks in the history of English fiction, Woolf detects flaws, a certain shrillness, that has arisen out of the defensive, ideological position from which she wrote.

Erudite, witty, compassionate and provocative, A Room of Ones Own is a landmark in both the history of English literary criticism and feminist theory