Reviewed by Nick, 2/27/15
I love reading books about how reading books can change your life. Author Andy Miller is closing in on 40 and feeling the pressure of working as a book editor while juggling his responsibilities as a husband and parent. He does not feel “engaged” with his life and he has lost his love of reading. So he begins a year-long journey of reading books he has always wanted to read, what he calls his “List of Betterment,” which includes classics from various eras, plus two Dan Brown thrillers. This book is at times a memoir, a confession, literary criticism with an occasionally outrageous Hunter Thompson vibe that makes you laugh. The result “is the story of an attempt to integrate books—to reintegrate them—into an ordinary day-to-day existence, a life which was becoming progressively less engaging to the individual living it.” By the end of his year of reading dangerously, Miller was feeling much better about his life and he had inspired me to create my own “List of Betterment.” The first book on my list is a title I am ashamed to admit I have never read: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.