We Are What We Read A Life Within and Without Books
Vybarr Cregan-Reid is an unlikely academic. Someone who knows what it’s like to be written off, who left school with no qualifications, who desperately needed a second chance. He also understands better than anyone the power of literature to change a life.
From a turbulent start, through a disastrous education, truancy and petty crime, to a distinguished career as an English professor, We Are What We Read weaves Vybarr’s own unexpected life in books with a spirited history of the war on the humanities, uncovering the profound impact that books have in shaping our reality at a time when their value is under attack from governments around the world.
Part memoir, part manifesto, part history, We Are What We Read is not just about how education can place you back on the right side of the tracks. It is also a rallying cry for the importance of literature in a world where the arts are being squeezed out at every level and where book bans in schools and libraries have surged to record highs. It’s about the joys and the transformational power of reading and how our brains are rewired by books, exploring how literature offers a vital means of connection in a fractured world. Reading is not merely an escape – it’s an essential part of who we are.
Reviews
“A wonderful book. I endorse it with all my heart.”
Miriam Margolyes
“The boldest, clearest, most beautifully written articulation I have yet read of the life-changing properties of literature and why we disdain and downgrade its study at our peril. We Are What We Read should be a set text for the next Education Secretary and required reading for anyone who doubts the transformative potential of arts and humanities subjects.”
Caroline Sanderson, associate editor, The Bookseller
“If you are a book lover, this is a must-read. Intensely personal and intellectually robust, this is an exploration of the mighty novel and the power it has to shape lives, both collectively and individually. Necessary, provocative and moving, I read parts out to friends (‘did you know that…’) then found myself both sobbing and laughing out loud, sometimes on the same page. Vybarr is a guardian of the arts who deserves his own statue.”
Catherine Gray, Sunday Times bestselling author
“A deeply moving memoir and an impassioned ode to the beauty of reading and the magical, transformative power of literature. This clarion call for the preservation of the humanities is one we should all heed.”
Jules Montague, consultant neurologist and bestselling author
“This book tells important and arresting truths about books themselves: how they make us as readers, how they help us to learn complicated truths that can’t be found elsewhere and how crucial the study of them is to a life fully lived.”
Professor Gail Marshall, chair of University English and head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading
Share this book
Buy this book
- Hardback, 304 pages
- ISBN: 9781785908187
- 11 July 2024
- £20.00
- eBook
- ISBN: 9781785909139
- 11 July 2024
- £14.99