“Yet more to the point — and here Leonard and I are in firm agreement —literature should provoke a strong reaction, an essential connection when nothing else will suffice. Leonard understood, as he writes again and again in this collection, that "[w]e must live together, and will die alone," and that a book, in the words of Franz Kafka, "must be an axe for the frozen sea in us." That this is, in the end, a futile endeavor is a key part of his faith: to pay attention, in the little time allowed us, to the things that matter, not to be distracted by ephemera and gloss. "[P]opular culture," he observes in the title essay, "is … like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go to complicate ourselves."   Amen, brother. I couldn't have said it better myself.”

    -excerpted from David L. Ullin, LA Times Book critic’s review of Reading for My Life, John Leonard, appearing in the Los Angeles Times Bookshelf on Thursday, March 15, 2012