Stirring and sparkling ... Sharp, sad ... A representative quip — funny, brutal — in a book that could have easily lapsed into sentimentality or cliché. Bibliophobia tackles topics that lend themselves readily to treacly treatment — suicidal ideation, familial turmoil, heartbreak, eating disorders, cutting, the gray haze of depression — but the prose is too precise for baggy self-indulgence.
Chihaya rejects this kind of faith-based relationship to books ... Broadens, deepens, and disturbs our sense of reading’s risks. For Chihaya, the danger does not lie in the content of books but in her way of relating to them ... A book of paradoxes. It’s a profoundly satisfying book about the maddening inadequacy of books.
Chihaya...scrutinizes books in which she found great pleasure, unraveling the harmful lessons she clung to long after reading them ... A pitfall of the biblio-memoir is that reading about other people’s experiences of reading can be a bit like reading about other people’s dreams. Although Bibliophobia is never academic, it is often abstract ... It is a reminder that instead of searching for a story that explains everything, we might do well to embrace the uncertainty of the unwritten pages still before us.
Will strike a feeling of familiarity in some readers. It may encourage rereading or reading anew, and taking a closer look into how literature can sustain or derail us. It also feels like a force that may become, for some, its own brand of Life Ruiner.
