February 27, 2026
Why We Read, by Shannon Reed
I do not entirely regret to inform you that being obsessed with Pittsburgh has become my entire personality, and Shannon Reed’s collection Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out was the perfect Pittsburgh souvenir to bring home from my whirlwind trip for the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute. And not just because there’s an essay in the collection entitled “The Five People You Meet When You Work in a Bookstore” that’s dedicated to the very bookseller who sold me the book. (Is the sixth person you meet when you work in a bookstore a Canadian author who’s hiked across the city to see your beautiful bookshop and is a little bit too excited about having walked over a bridge? It turns out that nobody in Pittsburgh gets excited about crossing bridges! Unbelievable that bridge crossing ever gets old…)
I started reading Why We Read on my flight home, and finished it this morning, about 26 hours later, and I loved the journey from start to finish, in which Reed—a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh—takes the reader through her life in books and reading. She writes about growing up in books and libraries, and the safety and comfort she found in reading as a hearing impaired person. The essays are familiar, warm, and loosely chronological, personal but also with touches that will be universal to anyone who’s ever been compelled to pick up a book about books. (It’s me!) In between the essays are humour pieces with titles like “Signs Your May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction” (“Your name is Sarah.”) or “Signs You May Be An Adult Character in a YA Novel” (“You are dead.”).
A childhood pilgrimage to see the hole in the ground where the Ingalls family lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the saga of trying to get her preschool students to stop selecting a picture book version of “Old MacDonald” at story time, introducing her public school students to libraries, being assigned to teach a university course on vampires even though she’s terrified of vampires, adding George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo to her course syllabus and only after sitting down to read and realizing she didn’t understand the novel (!). How she skimmed for the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program and maybe missed the point (but got the personal pan pizza. She writes about how reading requires us to be vulnerable, to be okay with not always understanding or knowing, with being wrong sometimes. About pretentious English Major guys whose favourite novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Moby Dick…
Wise, kind, funny, intimate, and surprising, reading these essays feels like meeting a friend.
