The sortes Virgilianae is an old form of do-it-yourself divination: you open the Aeneid at random, put a finger on a verse, and therein find wisdom or solace tailored to your troubles. For the bored or “blocked” man of letters, Michael Dirda’s collection Bound to Please has a similarly tonic effect. It includes a hundred-odd of Dirda’s reviews—of books, yes, but also of the minds behind the books. Pick one at random. Depending on whether you know the work discussed, you’ll receive a thoughtful reconsideration or, perhaps more fun, an enthusiastic introduction.

Michael Dirda has reviewed books for The Washington Post Book World since 1978. Bound to Please represents, by Dirda’s account, 20 percent of his output. This is an impressive amount of writing; it is the result of a downright alarming amount of reading. (When did he eat, sleep, or bathe?) He was spurred not by penury and deadlines but by his love of words. His first review, two hundred words on John Gardner’s In the Suicide Mountains, took him a full day to write. “No prose since that on Trajan’s column,” he writes, “has been so carefully chiseled.”

Depending on whether you know the work discussed, you’ll receive a thoughtful reconsideration or, perhaps more fun, an enthusiastic introduction.

Every reviewer loves to read and write, or says he does, but Dirda’s joyful monomania goes beyond that, and it is a rare and wonderful thing. It’s infectious. If literary reading is on the decline, as the NEA’s recent “Reading at Risk” survey solemnly announced it is, Bound to Please ought to be required summer reading for high school students. One cannot browse in it without wanting to rush to a used bookstore and shell out for a stack. (I, for one, will be reading my wages at the Strand come next month. Thank you, Mr. Dirda.)

Dirda is a great guide, a Virgil leading both novice and experienced readers on a tour of his own Reader’s Paradise. His collection, promising to be a “literary education,” moves effortlessly from age to age, style to style, genius to genius. Sections like “Romantic Dreamers,” “Visionaries and Moralists,” “Lovers, Poets, and Madmen,” and “Writers of Our Time” organize this delightful embarrassment of riches.

In “Old Masters,” the first section, we find Herodotus, Ovid, and the Bible. There are surprises, too: an appreciation of the Bible is followed by an essay on William Tyndale, “the first translator, into English, of the New Testament from the Greek and of about half the Old Testament from the Hebrew.” We miss Shakespeare, but shake hands with Christopher Marlowe, brawler, spy, and playwright-poet—by way of Anthony Burgess’s Dead Man in Deptford. In a review of Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nights: A Companion, we are tantalized with the following:

Most of us, I suspect, know The Arabian Nights only from the simplified, bowdlerized versions found in the nursery. So to read the unexpurgated tales can be a revelation. First of all, they are quite exceptionally gripping. Two illicit lovers try desperately to convince a murderous demon that they are strangers to each other. The monster turns to the man and says, “‘Take this sword and strike her head off, and I will believe that you do not know her and let you go free.’ I replied, ‘I will do it,’ and I took the sword and sprang toward her.”

In bits like this one, Dirda seizes upon one of the great rewards of reading: the odd scene or detail that lodges itself unshakably in the reader’s imagination. Bound to Please is filled with such details; it whets one’s appetite for them. Thus is Pepys’s frenzied lechery evoked in one delightful, albeit barely intelligible, quotation: “mi mano was sobra her pectus, and so did hazer with grand delight.” (Next thing you know, you’re groping your shelves for a copy of his Diaries.) The ending of Borges’s story “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths,” in which a vengeful Arab king leaves his Babylonian enemy to die in the vast “labyrinth” of the desert, conjures up in a single paragraph the writer’s marvelous, byzantine imagination. Dirda is an expert at picking out these little reminders of why we love the writers we love to read.

Bound to Please ought to be required summer reading for high school students.

None of this is to say that Dirda focuses narrowly on literature as entertainment. His reviews are informed not only by his enjoyment, but also by stores of historical and critical knowledge. It is no small thing that almost every review of a foreign-language work includes a discussion of those translations considered best, and those to be avoided. (Dirda’s review of Donald Frame’s translation of the Complete Works of François Rabelais, for instance, dilates on the relative merits of four other translations. Can he really have read all of them?)

A four-page piece on Proust draws on a staggering wealth of materials: a biography by Jean-Yves Tadié, a volume of Proust’s letters, a “field guide” by Roger Shattuck, and an abridgment of A Remembrance of Things Past. Dirda, even in a brief essay, manages some sweeping gestures of appreciation:

To those who respond to his sinuous prose—and many people don’t—there is no more powerful hypnotic drug in all literature. In Search of Lost Time is no mere novel; it is a world, a universe that alternately expands into every layer of society and then contracts back into the Narrator’s consciousness. Its author once compared his masterpiece to The Arabian Nights. But the book might also be likened to a modern Metamorphoses, for it depicts both public and personal life as restless, uncertain, and disheartening, a domain of constant transformation, of unceasing flux and shocking revelation.

This is proof of Dirda’s discipline, dedication, and craftsmanship. Few reviewers would take in so much to produce such short pieces. For Dirda, it’s business as usual: he reads to discover, to add to the critical tools at his command. And anyone who raises a skeptical eyebrow at that abridgment of Proust should be advised: “During that gray and rainy fall of [Dirda’s] junior year in college, [he] read Proust steadily for five, six, eight hours a day.” It seems Dirda has heeded Balzac’s dictum—noted in the introduction to the section titled “Professionals at Work”—that “[c]onstant work is the law of art as it is of life.”

Dirda’s reviews please, as promised, but do they rise to the level of a permanent artistic contribution? Bound to Please is intelligent, comprehensive, and so indispensable to anyone who craves a real literary education. There’s just one thing: it doesn’t contain a single negative review. Not even any faint praise, really. On the first page of his introduction, Dirda explains, “By only the loosest definition … can the contents of Bound to Please be regarded as criticism. Instead, think of these articles as old-fashioned appreciations, a fan’s notes, good talk.”

For Dirda, it’s business as usual: he reads to discover, to add to the critical tools at his command.

So we have been warned. But simply pointing out a flaw doesn’t correct it, and the total absence of vitriol from these pages is a flaw. After five-hundred-plus pages of loving praise, one yearns for nothing so much as Dale Peck’s savage, occasionally foul-mouthed hatchet jobs, or James Wood’s precise dismantlings. One wants to see clay feet in pieces. After all, to be educated is to be able to sniff out garbage as well as genius. Alas, Bound to Please cannot help one cultivate that discriminating nose.

Hand in hand with this deficiency is Dirda’s sometimes somewhat hokey literary populism. He writes, “Bound to Please will, I hope, encourage its readers to look beyond the boundaries of the fashionable, established, or academic. No cultivated person today should be hamstrung by unthinking prejudices about fantasy, crime fiction, or the literature of other times and places.” (It is difficult to see where “the literature of other times and places” fits into that caveat, but we will let that be.) Preoccupation with low culture is fashionable and academic. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote of his distaste for professors who feign love for detective fiction. (He himself derided the genre as formulaic.) The point is not really whether there is good detective fiction, or fantasy, or sci-fi—certainly there is, on all counts—but that noisily proclaiming so is just a means of looking like a broad-minded literary omnivore, or, worse yet, a “man of the people.”

Can a man of Dirda’s intellect really desire any of this? Does he truly want to write for “the semimythical common reader … one who is sleepily flipping through the newspaper while sipping coffee on a Sunday morning”? Anyone who has devoted as much of his life to reading and study as Dirda has might reasonably prefer a reader with some of the mental equipment to appreciate that learning. Yet he is content to dwell in his Joe Paperback persona.

That persona grates at times. Many of these reviews, no matter how deep their critical insight or thorough their research, end with embarrassing lines like: “You laugh, you get dizzy, you lose your bearings or even your lunch. But what a ride!” or “You gotta love a book like that!” or (of a study of the eighteenth-century “Lunar Men”) “Start reading some night when the moon is full” or “What a love story! What a book!” Conclusions like these are lazy; they seem meant to distract that “common reader” from the uncommon brilliance of what he has just read—so that he scratches his head and says, “Gee, I guess he’s just a reg’lar sorta feller, like me.” There is something frightfully self-conscious, and yet un-self-confident, about this strategy.

The problem is: one tends to be suspicious of a critic to whom this chipper positivity comes so easily. There are bad or overrated writers in what we think of as the “canon.” Even the writers we love best stumble at times. Coming to grips with this is a necessary step in one’s development as a reader, but Bound to Please doesn’t adequately hint at it. It seems to say: Read, enjoy yourself, and you will have become a Reader. But Dirda doesn’t believe that, does he?

All told, however, none of these shortcomings ever quite overshadows the collection’s fine points. It is a thorough and beautifully written document of the great pleasure reading can bring. So it makes one want to read, and to read a great variety of things—literature, history, poetry, commentary, and on and on. This encouragement by example should be welcomed by both new and veteran page-turners.