I was looking forward to receiving Women Who Love Books Too Much, a BookCrossing bookring that I signed up for earlier in the year. From the subtitle, which I appropriated for this post’s title, I was expecting a discussion about women who devoted at least part of their lives to books, whether in the reading, writing, or collection of them. However, it focuses heavily on the ‘prolific pens’ and any mention of non-writing bibliophiles and bluestockings are relegated to brief sidebars. While I was pleased to discover several obscure writers such as Mary Manley, Dawn Powell, and Lenore Kandel, I would have liked to have seen more print given to women like Helene Hanff, Christina Foyle, Mabel Dodge, and Sylvia Beach.

Knight packs a lot of info into this rather slim volume. It’s a sort of literary buffet, where you are permitted just a taste, and if you want more, then you’ll have to order the entree. I think the book’s title could use some work – I have a minor quibble with the ‘too much’ part (is such a thing possible?) and skewed as it is towards writers, the subtitle isn’t quite accurate – but I now have a long list of women and works that I want to research further, and ultimately, I’m glad I read this book.