Reading Backwards opens with the autobiographical "My Life in the Theater," a memoir of the younger Crowley's earliest ambitions, and closes with the moving and memorable "Practicing the Arts of Peace." In between, the author offers us more than 30 carefully crafted essays, each one notable for its insight, intelligence, and typically graceful prose.

The opening section, A Voice from the Easy Chair, reflects Crowley's tenure as Easy Chair columnist for Harper's Magazine. Subjects include life under the once omni-present threat of the Selective Service Board, the enduring personal importance of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and thoughts on what it means to be truly well read. The second section, Fictional Voices, is filled with acute commentary on a wide range of books and writers, among them SF masters such as Paul Park, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Thomas Disch; the important, if neglected, historical novelist David Stacton (a model for the fictional Fellowes Kraft of the Ægypt novels); classic science fiction novels of the 1950s, and much, much more. The final section, Looking Outward, Looking In, ranges freely across a wide variety of subjects and ideas, such as UFO literature, the utopian architecture of Norman Bel Geddes, the life and career of renowned theosophist Helena Blavatsky, and the nature of time.