A Temple of Texts provides the most seductive introduction to Gass's world of words, if only because it includes an annotated list of his favorite books. Originally published as a pamphlet (I am looking at my own copy now), "A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars" reprinted the extended captions accompanying an exhibition at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gass taught philosophy for many years. He tells us that he dashed off these 100 to 200-word notes in just a few days, but they are marvelous miniatures nonetheless. Each is essentially a love letter, a Valentine. Plato's dialogues, Gass forthrightly claims, "are among the world's most magical texts." Paul Valéry's Eupalinos is "my favorite essay." "Of the books I have loved . . . there has been none that I would have wished more fervently to have written" than Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End stands as "the most beautiful love story in our language." Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space offers "writing which gives me a warm feeling, like sunny sand between the toes." See what I mean? You want to run to a bookstore already.
from a review of A Temple of Texts (William H. Gass) by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post February 19,2006
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