She Read to Us in The Late Afternoon: A Life in Novels | 
pickThis was a beautiful study about how literature shapes and infiltrates our lives. She reads many of her novels while teaching overseas, which gives them special depth. Hill shows how novels unify the human spirit, which is certainly a heartening message. And, she makes me want to read the full Proust, which is quite the endeavor in itself!
A book about books!
pickA memoir with each chapter telling of her life and the novel she is reading as each stage/experience occurs. Reading Madame Bovary, Willa Cather, Proust, Achebe, Portrait of a Lady affects each passage of her life. Her musings on words, on books, on how they can be a mirror that reflects a world unknown to you and yet can place you inside that world for years to come, reverberating thru the years, was interesting. Some great writing.
I stumbled upon this at the library yesterday. This blurb by Andre Aciman sold me on it, "We've always believed that books were like a soundtrack to our lives & that our day-to-day lives stood in the foreground. But this stunning book tells a different & surprising tale: it is our lives that slip into the background & books-those fabulous books that alter who we are when we know how to read them or when we're lucky to have them read to us-?
