In this delightful memoir, the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air reflects on her life as a professional reader. Maureen Corrigan takes us from her unpretentious girlhood in working-class Queens, to her bemused years in an Ivy League Ph.D. program, from the whirl of falling in love and marrying (a fellow bookworm, of course), to the ordeal of adopting a baby overseas, always with a book at her side. Along the way, she reveals which books and authors have shaped her own life—from classic works of English literature to hard-boiled detective novels, and everything in between. And in her explorations of the heroes and heroines throughout literary history, Corrigan’s love for a good story shines. “Irresistible. . . . Corrigan has some wonderful insights. . . . Book lovers will be busy checking her lists, searching for new ‘leave me alone’ titles.” — The Washington Post Book World “Corrigan’s eclectic taste and skillful assessment of new writers as well as those long dead are particularly astute.” — USA Today “[A] brilliant and funny narrative of [Corrigan’s] own reading life, which ranges from her Catholic childhood to graduate school and a career as a professional reader. . . . Utterly original.” — Chicago Tribune “Corrigan is erudite without being the least bit pretentious. . . . Dipping into Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading is a little like visiting that friend whose house is always full of books and who always sends you home with one you’re excited to read.”— Detroit Free-Press Maureen Corrigan is the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times , Newsday , The Nation , The Boston Globe , The Village Voice , and other publications. Winner of an Edgar Award for criticism, Corrigan also regularly writes a mystery column for The Washington Post and teaches literature at Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter, both avid readers. CHAPTER ONE Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Women's Extreme-Adventure Stories (and One of My Own) Among the many dangers of being an obsessive reader is that you tend to mediate your life through books, filter your experiences through plots, so that the boundary between fiction and fact becomes porous. One evening, during the years I was living as a graduate student in Philadelphia, I was watching TV when a commercial for the local electric company came on. The commercial was promoting a program to help addled senior citizens keep track of their bills. On the screen was an elderly man sitting at a dining room table, staring at a pile of windowed envelopes. He looked a little bit like my dad, and sure enough, as the screen widened out to include the rest of the room, there was a big black-and-white photograph of my father as a toddler, dressed in a sailor suit, surrounded by his two older sisters and their parents. "Oh, there's the photograph," I thought to myself. I had a framed copy in my living room--all the Corrigans and their descendants have a copy of that photograph hanging somewhere in their homes. Aside from being a striking image--my grandfather with his handlebar mustache staring soberly into the camera; my grandmother in a long dark dress with a lace collar, holding my dad on her lap; my two aunts, smiling, one in a First Communion dress--it was a picture occasioned by tragedy. My grandmother Margaret had been diagnosed with cancer, and she and my grandfather John had the photograph taken to help the children remember her. She died in 1925, when my father was five years old. "Oh, there's the photograph." It took me at least a full minute to realize that the Corrigan-family photograph was on TV. I was like those American soldiers described in Dispatches, Michael Herr's great book about Vietnam, who, as they ran into enemy fire, shouted "Cover me!"--a line they'd absorbed from countless World War II movies. I, too, had gone to a lot of movies and watched too much TV. My fuzziness in distinguishing between reality and simulacrum was a postmodern condition shared by all of us who'd come of age in the culture of spectacle. But in my case, books were the worst troublemakers when it came to wreaking havoc with my head. From adolescence on, at least, I've read my life in terms of fiction, and so that evening, when I saw a personal object from my life turn up in a TV commercial, it seemed, at first, natural. (By the way, after calling the electric company's public-relations office, I learned that the photograph had been found in a secondhand-furniture store on Arch Street in Philadelphia. The location made sense. The one-two punch of my grandmother's death followed by the Great Depression a few years later knocked the Corrigan family down. House and car disappeared and my grandfather John, taking advantage of the first month's free rent offered by desperate landlords, moved with the children into a series of apartments in West Philadelphia. A lot of family treasures, like t