In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across painful, alarming or downright distasteful. In the former sense, reading is like food; in the latter, it is like drugs or alcohol.
In Autobibliography, Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two of his favourite books ? from Dhammapada and Marcus Aurelius, via The Tibetan Book of the Dead and La Rochefoucauld, to Robert Bolano and Emmanuel Carrere ? as well as the memories they trigger and the reverberations they create. It is a record of a year in reading, and of a lifetime of books.
Provocative, intelligent and funny, it is a brilliant introduction to a personal canon by one of the most original and exciting writers around. It is a book about books, a book about reading, and a book about a writer. It is an autobibliography.
About the Author
Rob Doyle was born in Dublin and holds a first-class honors degree in philosophy and an MPhil in psychoanalysis from Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of the story collection This Is the Ritual and the novels Threshold and Here Are the Young Men, also a forthcoming film for which he cowrote the screenplay. He is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
