How to Read a Book

A Novel

By: Monica Wood

Narrated by: Eileen Stevens

Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

"The perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours....A reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world." —New York Times Book Review

"A beautiful, big-hearted treasure of a novel." —Lily King

National Bestseller *

From the award-winning author of The One-in-a-Million Boy comes a heartfelt, uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…

Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.

Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.

Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.

When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.

How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.

"A deeply humane and touching novel; highly recommended for book clubs and fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures." — Booklist

©2023 Monica Wood (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

This book wrecked me!

I don’t want to say anything except that this book touched me deeply and profoundly. I cried for myself and the people in the book. I laughed with them. I recognized my own sorrows and mistakes and worries and insecurities and history in theirs. Through the book I was given a gift of “imagining” the end of my life and looking back from there to the beginning. This book is a treasure.

Loved the characters.

Amazing. One of those that I’m sad is over. I wish I could discover it all over again.

The characters, I just finished snd I miss them already.

I enjoyed this gentle tale of love and forgiveness. As an older lady I appreciated the romance between Harriet and Frank.

How to Do Mercy

This book reminded me of Remarkably Bright Creatures but in its own brilliant way. Mercy is an underrated thing in our world, and this book was a great reminder of that. Beautiful.

Heartfelt imaginative story

Words can not describe just how amazing I found this book to be. I cannot recommend it highly enough!

What an unexpected surprise .

What an unexpected surprise . I loved this book . It’s a wonderful story and one of the best I’ve listened to this year .

New emotional responses to old stories.

I loved the characters and the kind of people they were. I liked that things didn’t go perfectly but lessons were learned and life went on.

Great story!

Perfect summer listen - captivating and wonderful full of surprises and deeply imagined characters. Themes of redemption and love, the story had interesting embedded stories about animal cognition. A great read!

Meanwhile

I remember reading about how Ms. Wood came up with the title to one of her first books, "When We Were the Kennedys", which is such a wonderful read. I believe that a friend of hers suggested it as a catchy title instead of the one Ms. Wood intended to use. "How to Read a Book" is another great title, which I believe materialized in a somewhat similar fashion. I feel like the title is perfect in that it has so many meanings when applied to the plot and characters in it. The old English idiom "Do not judge a book by its cover" is a wonderful corollary which applies to many of the characters in this book, too. "How to Read a Book" should become a best seller based on its prosaic language, lovable characters, and depth of human emotions so well created and meshed. But, it is the last chapter which truly makes the book worth reading. This is where "Meanwhile" rises, like a phoenix, from "Spoon River Anthology" - a very powerful ending which puts all of our lives in perspective. What better reason could there be to read a book.

Jerry Conley

A must-read

I loved everything about this book: the characters, the language, the plot, and the performance. My favorite book of the year, so far.