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"Blair concludes that even today, programs such as Oprah's Book Club indicate that esteem for reading is based on its emotional and social value as well as its material: i.e., the widespread internalization of 'reading up.'... Recommended." Choice, September 2012 For historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Reading Up offers a detailed examination of the strategies that mass magazines offered readers as they plotted their upward mobility... Scholars interested in the business of literature, the hierarchies of culture, and the construction of the striver as a social type will find Reading Up to be a good investment. - Edward S. Slavishak, H-SHGAPE, January 2013 "Reading Up is certainly about books, but it is also about a way of using books that reveals the do-it-yourself nature of popular literary advice... Blair has tapped into a fascinating turn-of-the-century relationship... Scholars interested in the business of literature, the hierarchies of culture, and the construction of the striver as a social type will find Reading Up to be a good investment."--H-Net, January 2013 "In this stimulating work, Amy L. Blair examines the complex interactions between authors, critics, and the reading public in the early twentieth century...The bulk of this book is a careful analysis of the advice columns [Hamilton Wright] Mabie penned over ten years (1902-1912) for the Ladies Home Journal... Well-written, creative, and persuasive, Blair uncovers the often implicit negotiations between reviewers, authors, and readers. Her work significantly enriches our understanding of socially ambitious reading in the decades before middlebrow culture."--Information and Culture, 2012 "Blair emphasizes the importance of contextualizing books and readers in their own cultural moment... Her idea of the 'highbrow bestseller' is one of several extremely useful concepts (the 'readable James' is another!) through which Reading Up highlights the blurry line between aesthetic taste, cultural capital, and financial ambition in the 'culture of success."--American Literary Realism, Winter 2013 "Reading Up explains with force and wit why specialists in reception, but also literature scholars and social historians, should return to [Hamilton Wright] Mabie... Blair derives insights grounded in Mabies columns... Reception scholars will admire Blairs lucid and well-substantiated reconstructions of the plots and characters... Reading Up makes a powerful contribution to existing knowledge of a 'messy fracturing of the literary landscape at a very early point in the 1890s and 1900s"--Reception, Fall 2012
