REVIEW for The Man Who Loved Books

Thank you to Lydia at Penguin Books for sending me a copy of this book.

TITLE: The Man Who Loved Books

Too Much

AUTHOR: Allison Hoover Bartlett

GENRE: non-fiction

RATING: 3 Stars

I love reading books about books - as a matter of fact one of the best ones I have ever read is called Used and Rare by Lawrence Goldstone. So with this in mind, I was thrilled to read The Man Who Loved Books.

This is actually a true story - the author Barlett goes on a "mission" of sorts to discover more about books and more specifically the stealing of rare and precious books. As part of her training, she meets up with various vendors at an Antiquarian Book Fair. She will also hook up with Ken Sanders, who has made a career of tracking down these thiefs.

While this book was fun to read, it really did not go deep into the book world - rather it gives us an overview of some parts of the book world - specifically those related to value of the book and the interest a thief would have in the book which is fine considering the subject matter of this book.

However, what ends up happening is that I found myself not caring all that much about the whole thief aspect of this book and hoping that more would be told about rare books.

I think this is what happens when you ask a booklover like me to read a book about books - I ended up caring more about the subject of books then about the guy stealing them or the guy trying to catch the thief.

Which is to say that I am not sure that I am the best audience for this book, perhaps someone who is into the more "technical" aspects of a whoddunit would be better suited to read this one?

Overall, it was a fun book to read, but I think I may have missed the point of the storyline a little bit :)