I love being in the library when it rains. I love how it sounds like thunderous applause out there, the sky dark even though it's midday. I like how everything in here grows quiet, as if it is listening with electric attention to the rain.
I have been working in public libraries for a long time: surrounded by tens of thousands of books each day. I've been a library user even longer: since childhood. And I have read lots and lots of wonderful books, for which I am abundantly grateful to the inspired authors who wrote them. Still, to this day, one of the toughest questions that I ever have to answer is, "Can you recommend a good book?" [1]
Why?
Haven't I figured this out by now?
Shouldn't it come naturally at this point?
The thing about this question—"Can you recommend a good book?"—is that it is not as simple as at first it may seem. The author, Dan Brown, once quipped that when he releases a book into the world, there is no longer one of whatever he has written, but a million different versions of the story. This is true for the simple reason that each person who reads his book is engaged in a highly co-creative process; they become partially responsible for what results in their own imaginations. It's similar to following a recipe at home; what comes out of your oven may have been the result of a recipe somebody else has written, but you are still the one who baked the cake—you can take ownership for that. And I know from comparing my own results to those of my grandmother, for instance, that every person puts something of themselves into the mixture. Take Saturday-morning pancakes: no matter how I try, I can never get them as crispy around the edges as my grandmother's pancakes, can never capture that elusive Grandmother's house flavour. Don't get me wrong, my pancakes are still highly acceptable (at least my children think so), but they are never the same as my grandmother's pancakes. Reading a book is like that. A great deal of what happens when we read a book comes out of who we are as people and as readers and not merely what is written on the page.
"...When we talk about reading, we often focus on the books themselves, but so much of the reading life is about the reader as an active participant...
...avid readers know that a great book doesn't exist only in the realm of the material... [books] are more than objects... When we read, we connect with them (or don't) in a personal way."
- Anne Bogel
So, even the exact same book, borrowed and read by ten different people, will become ten slightly different versions of the story as it is brought to life in ten different readers' imaginations. This is the first conundrum when it comes to answering the question, "Can you recommend a good book?" My Little Women is not your Little Women, just like my pancakes are not my grandmother's pancakes, even if we use the exact same recipe.
A second enigma is that even if there was a way to make a written story less variable (such as with a cinematic retelling that determines precisely what characters look and sound like, where the shots are focused, how a line is delivered, what the music conveys about the emotions we should be feeling, etcetera) our tastes are going to be different. This is not the same as the variability of an imaginative product, but a subjective response that would vary even if we were dealing with an identical product.
Growing up, I remember my mother making a beautiful braided bread with sugared almonds on top. Almost every time she made it, I would try it again, wishing so hard that I could like it: all of my siblings did, but I never could (the cardamom in it made me feel slightly nauseous, always). How I wished I could love that bread! Everyone else relished it and I wanted to as well.
In the end, it was my particular taste, and not the bread itself, that was to blame for the fact that it wasn't an enjoyable snack. The same is true for books! A book that many people love, that critics acclaim and that tops bestsellers lists, may still not appeal to a reader's particular taste. In my case, even a book by the same author and in the exact same genre as a book I have previously enjoyed may miss the mark spectacularly (I'm looking at you, Nicholas Sparks).
Herein lies the second challenge when it comes to making a good recommendation. Taste, like the result of the co-creative process, is highly individual. As the author Gretchen Rubin notes, "What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you–and vice versa... nothing is inherently fun" (I empathized with this YouTuber who was taken paintballing for her birthday: an activity that many people enjoy, but she does not). The variability of our tastes applies to many things: from what is fun or soothing, to what is winsome or annoying. What strikes Jim as a really good book, in other words, may not seem like a good book at all when Dwight reads it. This seems obvious, in some sense, but if so, then what do we mean when we are asking for a "good book"?
It would be easy to say that it all comes down to personal preference, but in reality, the matter is more complicated than even that. Another of Rubin's aphorisms is that "the opposite of a profound truth is also true." It took me a long time to figure out how that could (in actual fact) apply to anything, but here is an example she gives:
"We want the people around us to accept us unconditionally, and we also want them to expect the best of us."
When it comes to a good book, it is remarkably subjective, however, there truly are some things that make some books more enduring than others. I won't get into it deeply, but for one thing, art tends to endure whereas "the cigar smoke of man" (as Thoreau puts it) is fleeting and transitory. It seems that stories don't endure when economics or politics interfere too much. When this happens, the artistic element (which is a wild animal, if ever there was one) becomes subdued, tamed, subordinate: becomes no more than the mounted head of a once terrifyingly beautiful, living, breathing thing. This is a significant danger, for a book [2].
As Henry David Thoreau put it:
"In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself—and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day."
Laura Brown-Lavoie compares her favorite sentences to "the lionesses" of the reading experience: pulling her in with their teeth. Julia Cameron describes how real inspiration will often arise for an artist "in much the same way that a red-winged blackbird will suddenly take flight and cross her line of vision." The poet, Ruth Stone, would sometimes have to pull a poem in backward, "by the tail" (if she had almost missed it galloping past her). The poem would end up on the page from the last word to the first, "backward, but otherwise intact." An artistic wonder is not a wholly domesticated thing.
"Can you recommend a good book?"
That depends. Not everybody wants to have a lioness pulling him in with her teeth. Not everybody wants to marvel at wild horses when they could be masters of broken ones. It took me years, until fairly recently, to finally find my way to certain books. There are books that I am still coming in at sideways, crouched low and wary, afraid that they might startle in a flurry of wings before I can get close.
This brings me to the third challenge, which is the ever-so-crucial when of a prospective good book. As Elizabeth von Arnim put it:
"Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them."
- Elizabeth von Arnim
For these reasons and more, I never know what to say when somebody asks me for a good book. There are variables upon variables. So much of it depends on the reader, on timing, on personal taste. So much depends on our mood, on our interests, on our needs in this particular season of life. There is seemingly no end to the complexities involved when it comes to searching for a "good book".
All of this said, take heart; if you are ever in the library, hoping for a good book, there is no higher calling for a librarian than the privilege of helping you find one. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't phenomenally worthwhile. Finding the right book can be life-changing. I've seen it happen. The right book can make you braver/smarter/wiser/kinder at exactly the right moment. Finding the right book can be similar to how it feels for me in this little library in the thundering rain: like all is right with the world, at least in this one small pocket of it.
I think of something Neil Gaiman wrote for a book called A Velocity of Being:
"Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it's waiting.
Go and look for it."
I wish you unhurried days, wild notions, and many good books.
Victoria Murgante
[1] It is easier with non-fiction. What I'm primarily referring to here are the stories: whole distilled (and sometimes improbable) worlds wrapped up in neat, portable packages—the fiction.
[2] Storytelling = art (whether it is a book, a live musical, a multi-million-dollar-production-budget film, etcetera).
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