Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

I just finished Maureen Corrigan's 2005 memoir on reading. She is the book reviewer on NPR's Fresh Air and has been since 1989. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and daughter. She is also a literature instructor at George Washington University. Maureen Corrigan has a PhD. in literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and I found the beginning of the book a little off-putting. Maybe because I haven't read all the great English literature she was writing about and making the comparisons with. She writes a lot about the "women's extreme-adventure stories" and this was a new genre to me.  But I learned and isn't that what you are supposed to do when you read. Because she is such a voracious reader she keep talking about why we read. I am very interested in that because I read so much also and often ask myself that question. For me, reading jars my memory in a way that is comforting to me; that I can remember and that I find myself in my reading. She also has a new book out, " So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures." Because I think that "The Great Gatsby" is one of the finest books in American literature I am finding this a very interesting book to read also.
    Back to "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading" I was excited to get into the part of the book that she writes about her love of the detective series. That's where we hit a common thread. Since leaving the library I have been free to read just for myself and I keep coming back to the detective series for pleasure. I like to start at the beginning of a series that has the same character and read in the published order of the books. I find that FantasticFiction does an excellent job of listing the books in order in an author's series. Some series must be read to follow the story line, others are written so that if you jump right in anywhere you get the gist of the storyline and you can enjoy the books that way. The alphabet mysteries by Sue Grafton don't have to be read in order. For example her book "W is for Wasted" has her living in the same apartment with the same landlord and time just seems to standstill at 1986. I have jumped around in that series without missing a beat. But Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley moves the characters along in their own storyline apart from the mystery, and I think they are more enjoyable read in the order they were published. That is just my personal preference. In the back of Maureen Corrigan's book is a list of Recommended Reading and I think I will be reaching for my book for this list in the future.