Critic has a passion, profession for books

Maureen Corrigan thinks there's a good chance her mailman is retiring this summer thanks to her.

That's because Corrigan, on average, gets about 200 to 250 books delivered to her home in Washington, D.C., each week.

As the resident book critic - highly trusted and loved by fans - for the past 25 years on NPR's 'Fresh Air,” being surrounded with that many books comes with the territory, Corrigan says.

'This is a dream job if you love to talk about books and you want to talk to a wider audience,” says Corrigan, who gets to choose the books she reviews.

'We try to cover the waterfront as much as we can,” she says. 'I've done reviews on everything from the latest Wimpy Kid book to a posthumous academic book about the Muggletonian religious sect by historian E.P. Thompson. As long as I can convince my producers that people will be interested and I can make my reviews accessible enough, I can cover it.”

Not surprisingly, Corrigan can rattle off the names of books and authors at the snap of your finger (although she admits to having her mind go blank when asked for book recommendations on the spot.) And she has a long list of books she's looking forward to reading this summer.

Once planning to be an English professor, Corrigan came into the journalism world in a roundabout way. A friend who had gotten a job at The Village Voice asked her to write a book review, and Corrigan enjoyed it.

'I loved the idea that you could be funny and enthusiastic and that I could bring my whole self into my book reviews.”

Not long after she connected with 'Fresh Air” in Philadelphia, her critic career took off.

Corrigan firmly believes book reviews should be more than just a thumbs up or thumbs down. She said she likes to model her work after a book critic who put books into a larger context when reviewing.

'We don't read books as discrete products,” she says. 'We need to connect them to larger things and things happening now. For me, the commentaries that stand out go beyond the obvious. I stop reading when book reviews are just plot summaries. I want to hear someone's voice and biases. I want to be entertained by the craft of the book review.”

'No one gives you a license to be a book critic,” she adds. 'You prove your right to pass judgment on someone else's work by the quality of your own writing.”

Corrigan has written her own books as well. 'Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books” is a literary memoir published in 2005.

'So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures,” published in 2014 and just released in paperback last month, explores her intense love for and appreciation of 'The Great Gatsby.”

When she's not busy reading or reviewing books, Corrigan is at Georgetown University, where she serves as critic-in-residence and lecturer.

'I really think I have the greatest combinations of jobs. I get to teach the classics and go back to what I love every year teaching at Georgetown. But I do new books every week for ‘Fresh Air.' ”

It's evident that Corrigan is passionate about books.

'I just can't think of a better way to spend time than sitting down with a great novel or piece of non-fiction. To me it is magic. And it's my greatest pleasure to review something that really seems like a literary miracle to me,” she says. 'I wish everyone could spend a couple of hours every day, if we had that luxury, just reading.”

Corrigan will speak at 7 p.m. Friday at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center in Cedar Rapids to kick off the annual Out Loud! Author Series presented by the Metro Library Network.