The Last Good Obsession: Thoughts on Finding Life in Fiction is a collection of hybrid essays that get personal about reading. Open to possibilities and insights, Sandra Swinburne settles into some of her favorite books to savor the way fictional characters spark her imagination and raise the past. She wonders over too real manifestations of her own vulnerable self in women named Oedipa or Joanna or Amy, and she prods family and friends for answers when she finds them "creeping about between paper covers." Book by book and essay by essay, memoir accumulates under a thin lens of literary criticism.