"My mother knew that books would lead me astray and she was right," says Jeanette Winterson in "Art Objects," her ambitious new essay collection. The author of such provocative recent novels as "Sexing the Cherry," "Written on the Body," and "Art and Lies," she here digs into such disparate topics as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, art appreciation, modern lit and lesbianism. The academic pieces are filled with such abstractions as, "The reality of art is the reality of the imagination," and far too many quotes from Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Blake.

Winterson, who lives in England, is much more spicy and engaging when she gets personal. "I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write," she states in "The Semiotics of Sex," where she also argues that the "Queer World" misreads art as sexuality and that a great deal of gay writing about the AIDS crisis is therapy and release -- but not art. Her charming essay "The Psychometry of Books" chronicles how, brought up in a home without books, she is now an avid book collector, calling it "an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate." As in her fiction, the author is most exciting when writing intimately about obsession.

-- Susan Shapiro