JC Hallman in Datebook:
Tompkins produced two fine books in the 1990s, “West of Everything” and “A Life in School,” but she more or less retired after that — until now, re-emerging with another impassioned missive that concerns itself with shadows and dualities and the self. “Reading Through the Night” is a perfect book for anyone who believes literature should amount to more than diversion and fodder for term papers. The recent trend in better writing about reading generally falls into two camps: books that tell the story of a writer’s relationship with another writer, and books that chronicle one’s reading life. Tompkins does both.
It begins when she receives an unexpected gift: Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” the author’s account of his tumultuous friendship with Nobel Prize–winner V.S. Naipaul, who died in August. Even more unexpected is Tompkins’s reaction to the book, which she is sure she will dislike. Rather, she is mysteriously enthralled, in no small part because Tompkins, a long-time champion of women and education, begins to spot bits of herself peeking out from the story of a feud between writers whose misogyny and racism and disdain for teaching is well known. How can that be? It’s so unsettling that Tompkins sets out on a kind of quest — reading the writers’ other books — to figure out what made “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” resonate so strongly with her and to begin to ask whether, contrary to critical vogue, finding oneself in books is exactly what reading should really be about.
More here.