“One of the great problems of attracting attention to a new book,” said a much loved novelist friend of mine, “is that Writer Writes Book is a crap headline.” Reader Loves Book, sadly, is not much better.
X Thousand Readers Love Book might do the business. Publishing phenomenon – which could include contested auction, record advance, film deal or all three – would be even better. That’s talking about cold hard cash, not ephemeral stuff like love.
Actually, even the last headline probably wouldn’t intrigue me as much as Reader Hates Book So Much She Throws it in Bin. Because that’s serious feeling there. And yes, I admit I have done it, but only twice and I’m not proud of it.
On each occasion it was not out of outrage or contempt – or even jealous spite.
It was because the book had really upset me and not in a good way. So much so, indeed, that I didn’t want anyone else to find it in my house and go through the same horror.
And no, I’m not going to tell you which books they were. My intense reaction was entirely personal. One had even been recommended by a close friend, who told me I needed to stop being a wimp, when I admitted my reaction.
I don’t know whether I’d feel the same on rereading either book now. But I do know I ain’t going to experiment.
All I will admit is that both writers were well-respected in their respective fields. And both were men. I really hope that’s coincidence.
Influence of Reader Loves Book
The answer is to sample before I buy. There are too many books and too little time for anything else. Word of mouth will send me to sample something, as will a friend’s recommendation. But some of my friends have much stronger stomachs than I do. Better safe than sorry.
Influence of Superior Reader Loves Book
Only one writer was named by two of the literati who had been invited to comment: Barbara Pym. Her own account of this is almost unbearably touching.
His birthday was last week and Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has given him a generous “revisit” on BBC Radio 4. These are 15-minute conversations and pondering, five of them so far, which I shall definitely revisit myself. And there are five more to come next week, too.
These two readers were such heavyweights that suddenly publishers, having uniformly rejected Pym’s work as outdated, fell over themselves to woo her back. Well, a couple did, anyway.
It is pleasing to relate that she rejected an offer from one of the rejectors in favour of Macmillan. This was for Quartet in Autumn which went on to be short-listed for the Booker Prize that year.
Revenge is sweet.
Reader Loves Book – but Why?
Chemistry. It’s the only way I can account for it.
They are books I can write a half-way respectable review for, setting out logical reasons why someone else might enjoy them.
Now those reviews could be useful to another reader, perhaps. I can base my evaluation on evidence.
But love… that’s different. I find writing a review for a book I love is just about impossible when I’ve just finished it. So, as an experiment, I decided to wind back to a book I read earlier this year and absolutely loved.
Recollecting in Tranquillity
The novel is Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. It’s a debut novel published in April this year. There were rumours of a high-bidding publishers’ auction in the States, though I didn’t know that when I picked it up.
It got rave reviews, including from the New York Times. It hit NYT’s best seller list, and also the Sunday Times’; got selected for the Good Morning America Book Club and the BBC Radio Two’s Book club. Apple TV bought the TV rights. I didn’t know any of that, either.
I first heard about it from earwigging on a conversation in a queue.
“It’s silly,” someone said. “Nobody behaved like that in the Fifties. I was there.” “Nobody has that much bad luck,” said another. “Even her good luck means she’s doing something she hates.”
I was already intrigued. But it was the third team member who sold it to me: “She has so little empathy, she’s almost as bad as a man. But it’s really funny.” Everything they said was true, in one way or another, but they disliked the book for it. And I loved it.
Same Book Different Reader
I
It is set in the fifties and early sixties in a South California where men run things. A woman who has stabbed her rapist with a pencil is asked by the policeman not investigating whether she’d liked to express regret. And then she gets kicked off her PhD because the rapist is her supervisor – a less gifted chemist that she is.
It is the start of a career distorted by male greed and violence. The injustice appals but does not surprise her. Her father is in jail for offences with a similar origin.
Yes, the rage and real tragedy are there too. And so are some wonderful minor characters, many flawed. At least one comes over from the dark side, which appeals to me a lot. Justice is achieved in the end, partly because of Elizabeth’ Zott’s character, partly because of small actions by several of those minor characters and partly because of coincidence, that mainstay of the fairy story.
But why so much? Well, those are some of the reasons. But in the end it could just be chemistry. Maybe it’s a sort of visceral recognition because, like Zott, I stick pencils in my hair.
What do you think?
Sadly, I’ve never had the kind of hair that pencils will stick in, but I’ve heard people raving about this book and recommended it to my daughter as something I thought she’d enjoy. (It’s just been added to her book group’s list for this year.) And now, after reading this, I’m rather desperate to read it myself. I’m off to download a sample…
Really hope you enjoy it, Liz.
Like Liz, I’m going to download a sample. And, like Sophie, I don’t know that I could explain just why I love three particular books so much. One, Three Men in a Boat, is perhaps, but not only, obvious because it is laugh-out-loud funny, but the other two, The Swish of the Curtain and I Capture the Castle – well, I just don’t know. But I do know an awful lot of people – women – who love them as much as I do. Hmmm…
I read The Swish of the Curtain again and again when I was young. Just loved it. Never had my own copy, though. Must read it again.
I came to I Capture the Castle a bit later but was always troubled by the crazy writer father. I think I liked it more later. Probably once I’d learned about writer’s block the hard way, now I come to think about it.