Overview

In this passionate, intelligent and disarming account of the power of books and how they can change a life, Professor of English Vybarr Cregan-Reid tells the story of his own remarkable journey into books, while also investigating what is happening on a political level to the study of literature and the arts more broadly. Join him as he takes us from life as a professor all the way back to his beginnings as a person more committed to petty crime than poetry, felonies than Forster, truancy than Thomas Hardy. Part memoir, part manifesto, part history, We Are What We Read is a poignant and crucial look at why books matter, at a time when their study and what they have to offer is under attack from governments around the world. This is a book about the joys and the transformational power of reading and how our brains are rewired by books. As such, it is also an informal introduction to many of literature's greatest works and its finest writers. But it is also about work and family, and how misfortune can give you the drive to want something else, to become someone else and then give that to others. Written by someone who knows what it's like to be written off, We Are What We Read will convince you, as much as any number of facts and figures, of the true impact of reading.

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9781785908187

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Vybarr Cregan-Reid is professor of English and environmental humanities at the University of Kent. He is the author of Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human (Ebury, 2016) and Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us (Cassell, 2018). He has written widely about literature, nature and the environment for the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, the Big Issue, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Washington Post, the Literary Review and many others.

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