Musty Reads

While shopping in a used bookstore, John Lingan stumbled upon Michael Dirda, the famous book critic, "known apocryphally as the best-read man in America." He tagged along to see "what the farthest-ranging literary mind looks like in its natural habitat":

Dirda’s final pile included the Bradbury, Davies, Twain, the Zola bio, and an extremely handsome book of Cézanne prints that he’d poached, in passing, from the Art shelf. There were others, things I didn’t recognize and things that looked, in all honesty, like juvenile garbage. But if I’d learned anything by following him around, it was that you don’t get to be the best-read man in America by giving a damn about someone else’s taste. You buy and read books that entice you for small reasons like a good cover or an intelligent introduction, books that appeal to your eccentricities. You keep as many books as possible nearby because they are in fact the very record of your eccentricities.