I Want To Be Michael Dirda

Sometimes I think that I want to be Michael Dirda. He would probably say that I don’t really know what his life is like and eloquently explain why I wouldn’t want to be him. I’m sure he would be right. I only know him and his life through his writing in The Washington Post and his books. 

So, I only know a limited part of his life, but the part I know….wow!

Depending on who is talking, he is a columnist, book reviewer, and/or book critic. However he is labeled, when he talks books I want to hear what he has to say. It doesn’t matter what book or books he is talking about; I always want to hear what he has to say.

For me, no one rivals Dirda. 

Dirda has been writing for The Washington Post since 1993. I can’t say with confidence that I remember reading him back then, but I’ve been reading The Post much longer than that so I’m pretty sure I have been reading him since then. Dirda is unlike many reviewers who write reviews of the latest books and often concentrate on best-sellers. He does write about new books, but often he is writing about old books. Sometimes telling you things you didn’t know about books you do know. Sometimes telling you about books you never heard of and usually leaving you wondering how you had read this long without knowing about them. 

In addition to his work at The Post, Dirda has written a handful of books about books and reading. I haven’t read them all, but I intend to. It is a measure I never thought of before I was writing this, but the list of books he has written introductions to is nothing short of amazing. Did I mention that sometimes I think I want to be Michael Dirda? 

Here is a partial list:

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes

Robertson Davies’s The Deptford Trilogy (Any Davies fans out there?)

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Novels

Frank Herbert’s Dune

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy

What a reading list! And people wanted him to write the introductions to these and more. As if this wasn’t enough, he wrote an essay about Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins. I am a big Cleary fan. Ramona forever!

I suspect Dirda will come up again. I would love for us to interview him. That would be fun. Anyone else a Dirda fan? Let us know at twosides2thestory@yahoo.com