What do you think?
Rate this book
River of Books
A memoir of reading and working with books by the renowned Booklist editor.
With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman’s journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.
With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman’s journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.
249 pages, Paperback
Published November 5, 2024
11 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
November 1, 2024
During my 41-year career working in a public library, a Booklist magazine was always on my desk, awaiting my perusal to read adult fiction reviews to purchase books for the library and add titles to my personal reading list. So, for years, Donna Seaman was a familiar name as I read columns and book reviews, and I was a little envious of her job. Reading her memoir about her journey of reading books and how they affected her life was just what I needed right now. I must admit, though, that her reading tastes are far loftier than mine. For example, as a teen, while she was reading Virginia Woolf and Herman Hesse, I was reading Victoria Holt and Harold Robbins, and I admit my reading tastes pretty much stayed the same. However, I found a few intriguing books to add to my TBR list from the comprehensive list of titles she included at the end of the book.
This a good bet for readers who liked Anne Bogel's "I'd Rather Be Reading," Dwight Garner's "Upstairs Delicatessen," and James Patterson's "Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians."
Thanks to the publisher for the advanced digital reading copy. This is due to be published on November 5, 2024.
This a good bet for readers who liked Anne Bogel's "I'd Rather Be Reading," Dwight Garner's "Upstairs Delicatessen," and James Patterson's "Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians."
Thanks to the publisher for the advanced digital reading copy. This is due to be published on November 5, 2024.
January 22, 2026
This author came to speak at my Chicago group Friends of American Writers and my friend, Julie, gave me her book as a gift. Ms Seaman has had a remarkable life dictated by art and reading. We share a love for many of the same books, but the volume of what she’s read is incredible. If you love books, don’t miss this informative gem.
February 3, 2025
Really comforting enjoyable read; I felt like I got a cozy speedrun of literature and authors I should read
April 17, 2025
A fellow bibliophile's journey of bookish delights!
January 15, 2025
Amazing! Absolutely recommended for readers and book lovers. A magical book that celebrates a life of joy and discovery through reading.
July 27, 2025
Recommended for fans of memoirs based around the important books the author has read.
April 19, 2025
No notes. Perfectly captures the weight books holds in a readers life. Inspired and awed by Seaman and her story.
My favorite quotes (and there are LOTS):
- “Like rivers, books connect places near and far; books and rivers contain and sustain lives.”
- “My reading habit, my trust in literature, and all the illuminations that reading bestows determined many of the choices I’ve made and helped me cope with all that is beyond our control, the vast whirl of epic forces and perpetual chance and change that propel life’s infinite complexities and paradoxes.”
- “At least in the library, surrounded by books and magazine, free to browse the shelves and think about what to read next, I felt hopeful and inspired instead of belittled and oppressed. I still have my Library Club pin.”
- “Each book expanded my mind-map of the human condition, of Earth and the cosmos, and as grim as much of that knowledge was, on good days it felt subtly empowering.”
- “I read insatiably because I was angry, alienated, yearning, depressed, and determined to know more. I read to anchor myself to something larger and more meaningful, to a universe I could trust.”
- “Books can be springboards for social change, offering arguments for change and charting the way forward.”
- “I always snuck back to where I was happiest, the pages of books.”
- “A new city would inspire many changes and a whole new round of books.”
- “In my journals I wrote of my depression and discouragement, admitting that all I wanted to do was read and sleep.”
- “A fumbling loner on a quest, I struggled to reach and enter the great hall of literary radiance.”
- “I saw that literature was a river, enduring and deep, that it flowed without ceasing across space and through time. I knew that I could rely on it, that I could always immerse
myself in it and find sustenance and hope.”
- “How fortunate I was to be able to read voraciously from a young age. Reading is thriving. It’s a bedrock ability. I can hardly grasp the fact that we fail to teach this essential skill to so many children.”
- “Because reading is a path to freedom, throughout history enslavers and fascists have found ways diabolical and brutal to silence book people: humanitarians, educators, writers, journalists, publishers, librarians, and booksellers.”
- “The more varied our reading, the more detailed, intricate, and vital our perceptions become.”
- “Reading intrepidly is a form of lifelong learning, continuous continuing education.”
My favorite quotes (and there are LOTS):
- “Like rivers, books connect places near and far; books and rivers contain and sustain lives.”
- “My reading habit, my trust in literature, and all the illuminations that reading bestows determined many of the choices I’ve made and helped me cope with all that is beyond our control, the vast whirl of epic forces and perpetual chance and change that propel life’s infinite complexities and paradoxes.”
- “At least in the library, surrounded by books and magazine, free to browse the shelves and think about what to read next, I felt hopeful and inspired instead of belittled and oppressed. I still have my Library Club pin.”
- “Each book expanded my mind-map of the human condition, of Earth and the cosmos, and as grim as much of that knowledge was, on good days it felt subtly empowering.”
- “I read insatiably because I was angry, alienated, yearning, depressed, and determined to know more. I read to anchor myself to something larger and more meaningful, to a universe I could trust.”
- “Books can be springboards for social change, offering arguments for change and charting the way forward.”
- “I always snuck back to where I was happiest, the pages of books.”
- “A new city would inspire many changes and a whole new round of books.”
- “In my journals I wrote of my depression and discouragement, admitting that all I wanted to do was read and sleep.”
- “A fumbling loner on a quest, I struggled to reach and enter the great hall of literary radiance.”
- “I saw that literature was a river, enduring and deep, that it flowed without ceasing across space and through time. I knew that I could rely on it, that I could always immerse
myself in it and find sustenance and hope.”
- “How fortunate I was to be able to read voraciously from a young age. Reading is thriving. It’s a bedrock ability. I can hardly grasp the fact that we fail to teach this essential skill to so many children.”
- “Because reading is a path to freedom, throughout history enslavers and fascists have found ways diabolical and brutal to silence book people: humanitarians, educators, writers, journalists, publishers, librarians, and booksellers.”
- “The more varied our reading, the more detailed, intricate, and vital our perceptions become.”
- “Reading intrepidly is a form of lifelong learning, continuous continuing education.”
October 26, 2025
"Reading is protest; it is subversive, a withdrawal, a refusal. Reading is deeply pleasurable. There is a voluptuousness to giving oneself over to language and all that it conjures, an erotic charge in communing with the thoughts and feelings of another. The reader is physically at ease and mentally attentive, gliding away from the actual, the practical, the tedious, the aggravating and into an alternative realm imagined or reported or created in a heady combination of the two. Reading is a form of inebriation, but not of abandon. It's an active state of heightened receptivity. It's transporting. It bestows a sense of accomplishment." (16)
"The reader enters the consciousness of another, a realm incandescent with ideas and feelings translated into language as alive as flowers, birds, vines, dolphins. Words are infused with energy like sun dapples on water, embers, rain, surf, wind, bioluminescence. Words are faceted and bright like crystals, shimmering with aurora borealis. As we study the page, we hear the lines, feel the vibration, see the patterns of vowels and consonants and all the images those little symbols magically evoke." (17-18)
"Francine Prose writes, 'I've always hoped someone would fund a research project to measure the changes that occur in our brain waves when we lose ourselves in a book. What if it turned out that these changes have a beneficial effect on our health,...What is reading were proved to be even healthier than exercise?' Sedentary as reading is, it is healthful; it is nourishing." (18)
"There is a tendency to romanticize libraries, and I do lean that way even though I'm fully aware of the hard facts pertaining to these public spaces. Bette Howland, a long-overlooked, then ardently reclaimed Chicago writer of live-wire incisiveness and shredding wit ('She was giving him a hard time; people give what they can.') knew firsthand that while public libraries are sanctuaries they are also places of conflicts and confrontations, desperation and bizarreness, a pooling place of woes and the woebegone. Though her work had the support of Saul Bellow during his long tenure at the University of Chicago and earned her a Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, Howland had a tough life.
After a debacle at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop over the formatting of her thesis, she worked part-time for a spell at the Chicago Public Library's Uptown branch, starting in 1968. A compassionate, trenchant, and hilarious ethnographer of eccentricities and dysfunction, Howland wrote about the library in the story 'Public Facilities':
'But the one outstanding fact of life at Borglum Branch--the fact that so many of our patrons seemed to have nowhere else of any significance to go--was never mentioned. It was unmentionable...Regulars didn't even have library cards. What for? Who needed a card? They practically lived in the library.'" (47-48)
Stories help us dream of what may be possible, etc (97)
On Studs Terkel:
"Studs was a tireless defender of the freedom of speech and our freedom to read, speaking out against the banning of books and any and all interference with our intellectual freedom. He praised librarians as heroes." (151)
On working in libraries:
"Fielding requests, complaints, tantrums, chitchat, laments, conundrums, and come-ons at the circulation desk veered from entertaining to funny, touching, exhausting, depressing, unnerving, and enraging. It was a circus of emotions and anxieties, egomania and insecurity, curiosity and competition." (186-7)
"To lose one's only sibling is to lose half of one's life. To be reduced to half of oneself, to be bereft of shared memories and understandings, of a unique, guiding intimacy. To be left with a book half-burned." (197)
"The reader enters the consciousness of another, a realm incandescent with ideas and feelings translated into language as alive as flowers, birds, vines, dolphins. Words are infused with energy like sun dapples on water, embers, rain, surf, wind, bioluminescence. Words are faceted and bright like crystals, shimmering with aurora borealis. As we study the page, we hear the lines, feel the vibration, see the patterns of vowels and consonants and all the images those little symbols magically evoke." (17-18)
"Francine Prose writes, 'I've always hoped someone would fund a research project to measure the changes that occur in our brain waves when we lose ourselves in a book. What if it turned out that these changes have a beneficial effect on our health,...What is reading were proved to be even healthier than exercise?' Sedentary as reading is, it is healthful; it is nourishing." (18)
"There is a tendency to romanticize libraries, and I do lean that way even though I'm fully aware of the hard facts pertaining to these public spaces. Bette Howland, a long-overlooked, then ardently reclaimed Chicago writer of live-wire incisiveness and shredding wit ('She was giving him a hard time; people give what they can.') knew firsthand that while public libraries are sanctuaries they are also places of conflicts and confrontations, desperation and bizarreness, a pooling place of woes and the woebegone. Though her work had the support of Saul Bellow during his long tenure at the University of Chicago and earned her a Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, Howland had a tough life.
After a debacle at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop over the formatting of her thesis, she worked part-time for a spell at the Chicago Public Library's Uptown branch, starting in 1968. A compassionate, trenchant, and hilarious ethnographer of eccentricities and dysfunction, Howland wrote about the library in the story 'Public Facilities':
'But the one outstanding fact of life at Borglum Branch--the fact that so many of our patrons seemed to have nowhere else of any significance to go--was never mentioned. It was unmentionable...Regulars didn't even have library cards. What for? Who needed a card? They practically lived in the library.'" (47-48)
Stories help us dream of what may be possible, etc (97)
On Studs Terkel:
"Studs was a tireless defender of the freedom of speech and our freedom to read, speaking out against the banning of books and any and all interference with our intellectual freedom. He praised librarians as heroes." (151)
On working in libraries:
"Fielding requests, complaints, tantrums, chitchat, laments, conundrums, and come-ons at the circulation desk veered from entertaining to funny, touching, exhausting, depressing, unnerving, and enraging. It was a circus of emotions and anxieties, egomania and insecurity, curiosity and competition." (186-7)
"To lose one's only sibling is to lose half of one's life. To be reduced to half of oneself, to be bereft of shared memories and understandings, of a unique, guiding intimacy. To be left with a book half-burned." (197)
January 22, 2025
3.5 stars, rounded up.
This book has fantastic reviews. Most seem to come from people who are familiar with this author, presumably from her work as the editor of Booklist or from her work with the Chicago Humanities Festival or the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. I wasn't familiar with her, so reading this book was kind of random, especially since a good chunk of it is a memoir of her childhood and young adulthood.
It was a nice (though, as I said, random) walk through someone's growing love of books. It felt old-timey and nostalgic, a call-back to an era before the maddening pull of the internet or video games or highly structured childhood. What struck me most was the way this author found her way into the professional book world -- she seemed to wander into major institutions and voila! A job!, regardless of her lack of experience or specialized degrees. Today it seems like it would be improbable for someone to get a low level position at, for example, the Newberry Library without several relevant internships,glowing recommendations from esteemed people in the field, and a master's degree.
This book has fantastic reviews. Most seem to come from people who are familiar with this author, presumably from her work as the editor of Booklist or from her work with the Chicago Humanities Festival or the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. I wasn't familiar with her, so reading this book was kind of random, especially since a good chunk of it is a memoir of her childhood and young adulthood.
It was a nice (though, as I said, random) walk through someone's growing love of books. It felt old-timey and nostalgic, a call-back to an era before the maddening pull of the internet or video games or highly structured childhood. What struck me most was the way this author found her way into the professional book world -- she seemed to wander into major institutions and voila! A job!, regardless of her lack of experience or specialized degrees. Today it seems like it would be improbable for someone to get a low level position at, for example, the Newberry Library without several relevant internships,glowing recommendations from esteemed people in the field, and a master's degree.
January 3, 2025
How does a book reviewer offer commentary on a memoir by an esteemed book reviewer? Donna Seaman, the adult books reviewer for BookList (used by libraries everywhere to build their collections) has created a powerful personal reflection on not only how books have impacted her life, but how they can and do affect culture.
Seaman's writing is reflective, sometimes amusing and even a bit outrageous at times. The lyrical sentences are what one might encounter in one of her own book reviews. Excellent language skills provide a picture of what writing can mean to a child, a teenager, a young adult wrestling with their life's direction, and a career. While I realize our reading patterns are actually very different, there is a commonality that all avid, constant readers will recognize. Voracious readers get one another.
While this is a personal musing of a reading life, it definitely touches on cultural issues of racism, book banning, education concerns, and more. This should remind us all that reading is a gateway to understanding the world and our own place in it. Well done.
Seaman's writing is reflective, sometimes amusing and even a bit outrageous at times. The lyrical sentences are what one might encounter in one of her own book reviews. Excellent language skills provide a picture of what writing can mean to a child, a teenager, a young adult wrestling with their life's direction, and a career. While I realize our reading patterns are actually very different, there is a commonality that all avid, constant readers will recognize. Voracious readers get one another.
While this is a personal musing of a reading life, it definitely touches on cultural issues of racism, book banning, education concerns, and more. This should remind us all that reading is a gateway to understanding the world and our own place in it. Well done.
November 22, 2024
"I saw that literature was a river, enduring and deep, that it flowed without ceasing across space and through time. I knew that I could rely on it, that I could always immerse myself in it and find sustenance and hope."
River of Books is Donna Seaman's tribute to literature and the way it has influenced her life - from her childhood immersed in words to college and on to her work life both working in bookstores and libraries to ultimately a successful career as an editor for Booklist. The work is full of moments where one work has lead to another and where her reading and focus has altered based on the circumstances in her life. Regardless of where her life has pulled her, there have been connections to the written world that both expanded and explained the world she lives in. I enjoyed reading this - and loved that at the back of her memoir, she gives the reader a reference list of the works she refers to in each chapter.
River of Books is Donna Seaman's tribute to literature and the way it has influenced her life - from her childhood immersed in words to college and on to her work life both working in bookstores and libraries to ultimately a successful career as an editor for Booklist. The work is full of moments where one work has lead to another and where her reading and focus has altered based on the circumstances in her life. Regardless of where her life has pulled her, there have been connections to the written world that both expanded and explained the world she lives in. I enjoyed reading this - and loved that at the back of her memoir, she gives the reader a reference list of the works she refers to in each chapter.
August 30, 2025
I love books about books and books about readers reading books. Connecting the flow of rivers to the stream of books in her reading life and profession, Donna Seaman’s autobiography was enormously satisfying to read. I have underlined much, and added quite a few books to my own lists. I was drawn to the cover at my local library, have yet to return it, and finally bought my own copy so I could mark up and down the pages, as Seaman herself encourages. I feel I can return to this book easily, and will reach for it the next time I need to be swept away in another’s reading journey. I was initially worried about her reading list, which is filled with classics I haven’t (and choose not to) read. I worried for nothing; this is more about Seaman’s life, art, and craft than anything else. A River of Books is a love letter to reading and readers! Highly recommend.
December 27, 2024
As one who from childhood also finds joy in wading through the river of books that define a lifetime, and continues to do so - this is the never-ending story. It is our story. Though our paths and journeys differ one to another, we are adventurers who portage from one tributary to another led by the books that instruct our understandings. How lucky are we? Donna Seaman allows us to join her as she eloquently unfolds her personal journey through life as illuminated by books. We book people understand the need for that self reflection and appreciate how one person’s journey overlaps and overtakes another’s creating fields of unexplored rabbit holes to consider. Beautifully constructed sentences, rich and compelling word choices. A love letter to the love of books. What could be better?
January 18, 2025
What a delight to read the author's relationship and journey with books. This can be a manifesto for championing reading, showing how it aids in one's development. I loved how she talked about her sister's death: "To lose one's only sibling is to lose half of one's life. To be reduced to half of oneself, to be bereft of shared memories and understandings, of a unique guiding intimacy. To be left with a book half-burned."(197).
February 15, 2025
I love reading books reviews - I look forward to Sundays when the NYT arrives with its wonderful book review section - and expected to read fascinating capsule reviews in this book by editor-in-chief of Booklist. It’s actually a memoir including the importance of reading, particularly as it sustained her during very difficult times. She mentions titles books and authors throughout but provides little insight into the books. I was terribly disappointed
February 25, 2025
I loved Seaman's book reviews and essays in Booklist magazine, a must-read tool for librarians. So it was quite enlightening to read her memoir which is filled, of course, with the books she read and loved.
March 22, 2025
3.5. You would think that I would absolutely love a book about reading. I did enjoy it, especially the description of getting glasses and being a young woman who loved to read. It just didn't click with me like I thought it would. I did appreciate the list of books at the end.
Read
January 28, 2026No stars did not finish.
Nope too boring and not for me. Got to page 150 and had to stop.
For the rest of the book talk, visit my Vlog at:
https://youtube.com/shorts/bn9vNSvtkG...
Enjoy!
Nope too boring and not for me. Got to page 150 and had to stop.
For the rest of the book talk, visit my Vlog at:
https://youtube.com/shorts/bn9vNSvtkG...
Enjoy!
December 21, 2024
If you're a librarian, especially a librarian from Chicago area, you know Donna Seaman of Booklist. Bookish and lovely!
December 22, 2024
It was a pleasure to read how someone made their way to what they love. And whose life was surrounded by books and reading.
January 13, 2025
Donna Seaman, editor for Booklist, talks about her journey as a lover of books. She has ended up right where she needs to be :)
January 21, 2025
Not what I expected, nor wanted.
March 2, 2025
3.5. A short meander of a life through books; I particularly appreciated the section on her sister’s unexpected death.
January 5, 2025
This slim memoir took me by surprise. I expected tales about the pleasure and benefits of a reading life, but Seaman punches through with soulful, literary writing and a gritty personal story. Little Donna Seamon the child is sour, miserable, and positively cinematic. Hollywood should buy this and make her the heroine for over-thinking girls everywhere.
It is also so great to read about a woman who rose to - can we call it power? - in the literary arts by following her own quirky path. Bravo!
It is also so great to read about a woman who rose to - can we call it power? - in the literary arts by following her own quirky path. Bravo!
February 25, 2025
My Haiku review:
Do we find the books
Or do books find us in time
Words heal and transform
Stay curious my friends
Do we find the books
Or do books find us in time
Words heal and transform
Stay curious my friends
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews