This fall’s reasons to read too much

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to chide me about reading too much; it was, she said, a strategy for avoiding the world. Sure, books helped me hide from certain relatives and awkward social situations, but there was more to it than that.

I lived deeply in literature, met fascinating people, had experiences I might not have otherwise. I also noticed that my reading often mirrored the circumstances in which I found myself, as if there were some confluence between reality and art.

It is this phenomenon Alberto Manguel describes in “A Reading Diary,” a charming book being published in October that grew out of his discovery -- while rereading some of his favorite books -- of the way a “passage in a novel would suddenly illuminate an article in the daily paper ... a single word would prompt a long reflection ... how [the] many-layered and complex worlds of the past seemed to reflect the dismal chaos of the world I was living in.”

That process of reflection, of the relationship between life and creativity, motivates many books coming out this fall, including “A Reading Diary” and Gijs van Hensbergen’s “Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon,” which frames the story of Picasso’s celebrated painting as an argument for the transformative power of art. With “In the Shadow of No Towers” (just out from Pantheon), Art Spiegelman brings a similar point of view to Sept. 11, using a set of oversized, newspaper-style comics -- originally published as broadsheets in various periodicals -- to describe his efforts to come to terms with the attack on the World Trade Center, which irrevocably transfigured his lower Manhattan neighborhood.

In “The Plot Against America,” meanwhile, Philip Roth re-imagines history altogether, positing an alternate universe in which Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940 and entered into an alliance with the Nazis, a cautionary tale about the dangers of demagoguery with some unsettling echoes for today.

Roth’s book is only one of this fall’s compelling works of fiction; in fact, it looks as if many of our finest novelists have decided to release books all at once. Among the most eagerly awaited is November’s “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson’s first novel since her iconic “Housekeeping” appeared in 1981, although anticipation is also high for Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower.” Coming later this month, it is the final installment in the series he initiated 33 years ago.

Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (coming out in November) seeks to get inside the contemporary college experience from the perspective of a female freshman; Russell Banks’ “The Darling” (due in October) tells the story of a former member of the Weather Underground who becomes involved with Charles Taylor and the Liberian civil war. In the newly released “The Divine Husband,” Francisco Goldman evokes a different historical moment, imagining the life of Maria de las Nieves Moran, a Central American nun who falls under the spell of Jose Marti, the legendary Cuban revolutionary.

Cynthia Ozick has just published “Heir to the Glimmering World,” which takes us back to the 1930s with the picaresque saga of the Mitwisser family, German refugees who live at the whim of an elusive benefactor, while Jonathan Rosen’s “Joy Comes in the Morning” (out this week) examines a female rabbi forced to confront her own contradictions when she meets a man whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, leaving him a legacy of doubt. Finally, there’s “Men and Cartoons” (due in November), a collection of stories by Jonathan Lethem, which blends elements of fantasy, science fiction and subtle realism to get at the jagged jump-cut sensibility of how we live.

When it comes to jagged sensibilities, perhaps no American writer has been as influential as Jack Kerouac, whose “spontaneous bop prosody” helped revolutionize the way we see the world. Kerouac’s been dead for 35 years, but the books keep coming; the latest is October’s “Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954,” which offers a vivid glimpse of his inner life.

Of the artists Kerouac inspired, none may have taken him as much to heart as Bob Dylan, who adapted his freewheeling, imagistic style to his lyrics and, in so doing, reinvigorated rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan is the subject of “Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader,” edited by Benjamin Hedin (October), an anthology that, with contributions by Dylan, Sam Shepard, David Gates, Lester Bangs and Johnny Cash, offers an unexpectedly nuanced, collage-style portrait of the singer and his work.

The Man in Black too gets his due in Michael Streissguth’s “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece,” out this week. Small and lavishly illustrated, the book deconstructs Cash’s landmark album, framing it as “a visceral social statement for the ages.” If your interest is in more contemporary music, “Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing” by Benjamin Nugent (October) is the first biography of the indie rock icon who took his own life last October at age 34 in his Echo Park apartment.

What Smith (and, for that matter, Cash and Dylan) addressed in his music are the intangibles of doubt and self-fulfillment -- his experience of heaven and hell. For a less metaphorical view of such topics, take a look at “Heaven and Hell” by Mara Faustino (December), a compendium of lists, cosmologies and other ephemera that catalogs our fascination with paradise and its counterpart.

Heaven, of course, can be many things to many people, from the small, unpopulated spit of sand Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle explore in “Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic” (November) to the simple act of list-making, which Robert E. Belknap celebrates in his astonishing “The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing” (November). Certainly, food writer M.F.K. Fisher lived her own version of heaven, as recounted by Joan Reardon’s “Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher” (October).

Yet, hell too is always with us, whether of our own design or someone else’s. “The Street Law Handbook: A Survival Guide to Sex, Drugs, and Petty Crime” by Neeraja Viswanathan ( October) offers a guide to small-time misbehavior, while Robert J.S. Ross’ “Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops” (October) unflinchingly portrays the reemergence of the sweatshop in our dog-eat-dog economy.

If you’re a student of American history, the idea that sweatshops still exist is a bitter insult, illustrating just how little progress we have made. It’s useful, then, to turn back to the president who first identified the dangers of corporate malfeasance: Theodore Roosevelt, whose writings appear next month in two volumes from the Library of America: “The Rough Riders and an Autobiography” and “Letters and Speeches.”

For readers more attuned to intrigue, next month Walker will reissue “Call for the Dead” and “A Murder of Quality,” John le Carre’s first two George Smiley novels, originally published in the 1960s and relatively unknown. Of all this season’s reprints, though, none resonates like “Just Enough Liebling,” an expansive selection by New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, who, as much as anyone, is responsible for that magazine’s distinctive style.

Oct. 18 marks Liebling’s 100th birthday, which is the occasion for this collection, due out later this month, but the real draw is the work itself. Liebling is a classic voice, a journalist who elevated his reporting to the level of literature, whether the subject was food or prizefights, war or city life.

He is, in other words, emblematic of everything my grandmother was overlooking back when she’d admonish me not to read so much.