I’ve been an obsessive reader for four decades. The habit has been a gateway to everything from a childhood summertime library programme in California (where I scored a participant T-shirt declaring "I’m a Superstar Reader!" making my tiny self feel sparkly and empowered), to literary studies in London, to working in publishing here in Aotearoa. Yet there came a day, two years ago, when I stood in front of my bookshelves and the sight of my hoard just left me feeling boneless. Washed out.
All those books, all that beautiful, glinting, complex material, and I was being asked to compress it into straw, chaff: a few throw-away lines. The polar opposite, now, of emboldened and glittery, I felt more like an inverse version of the miller’s daughter from Rumpelstiltskin.
I was facing yet another request to nominate titles in a personal Best Books of the Year list. Otherwise known as: If You Work in Publishing and Many of Your Friends and Colleagues are Writers, Editors and Publishers, This is How to Hurt Them Unintentionally or Fill Them with Seething Resentment Because You Left Them off Your Top Ten Titles to Swoon For.
I was beset with the push-me-pull-yous. One side of me thought, compiling a Top Ten list is fine! Anything that helps celebrate the power of literature in the age of the screen-induced brain glaze is a force for good. But the other earnest, mulish side asked, isn’t this a sell-out? Isn’t this contributing to the ubiquitous over-simplification in so much public discussion?
From the wildly subjective, under-referenced, one-star, knife-wound reviews of "weird concept, ending sucked," on Amazon, to the photo of a cover with "OMG slay bae!!!!" on Twitter, to Fave Raves in print media: the field of reading recommendations can seem awash in a slurry of banality, breathlessness and even, painfully, the bile of envy.
Yes, I’ve participated, at least in the breathless category. But after scanning countless "best of" lists, doesn’t your brain, too, start to feel as if it’s being repeatedly pummelled with a candy floss mace, or the stuffed toy feather-swords the Wiggles tout to dysregulated toddlers (and their defeated parents) at town hall concerts?
Each time I agree to help with an annual top ten for the book scene, part of me feels it’s betraying a scholarly code of ethics. I’m not supporting my argument with extensive and relevant quotation! I haven’t examined my first reaction from at least five different angles, while also considering social and historical context, relevant aspects of biography and a rigorous, enlightening lens of contemporary theory! What’s more, the exercise, which is meant to be lighthearted and entertaining, is usually unpaid (though it can take hours) and it can pulverise other writers’ hopes. Given all these factors, it’s hard to embark on it breezily.
My bookshelves represented months and months of reading, yet when I looked at many covers, all I could summons was a sort of emotional tinnitus: blurry humming; a high, distant drone.
Even my recall of books I would claim to have loved was so hazy that surely it wasn’t love at all! It was ... a whole series of empty, meaningless, one- to maybe twenty-one-night stands.
Or perhaps I’d been behaving like I was sauntering along a regular commute, not really noticing the territory: reading had become safe in its familiarity, but I’d unwittingly switched to lexical autopilot, while the real focus of my thoughts was elsewhere. (Most likely, given the date, that elsewhere would have been the pandemic, news headlines, my family’s well-being, work-related decisions, deadline rush and numerous private anxieties.)
This was nuts. For so much of early motherhood, I’d hankered after time for deep, immersive, personal reading. Yet here I was, at a life stage when I finally did have a looser schedule, looking at the bookshelves and going dim.
If memory is identity, who was I without sharp recall of the pursuit I enjoyed most? If I was going to carry on as part of a book-savvy community, making recommendations and discussing merit, I was going to have to get far more actively conscious, even in my leisure reading.
So that limp day in November 2020 was when I decided to start a private reading journal. Nothing too heavy-going or detailed: the entries would be just enough, I hoped, that if another bibliomaniac asked me about a book, I could give a layered, energetic answer, instead of the colourless mouse-fart of "yuh, it’s rully gud!" I also figured, when literary editors asked for content for their annual roundups, I’d have a shortcut. Pithy yet faceted reactions, written in the immediate, clear-eyed aftermath of the reading experience, stored away but then seeming as fresh as the day they were scribbled: that was what I hoped to offer.
I also hoped that in making myself whisper, even just to a dog-eared, repurposed, school notebook, why some titles left me feeling frustrated, or like the child who cries "streaker!" of the emperor, I’d improve my own craft. I hoped to get a firmer grasp on qualities like narrative potency, lyrical lift, the interior architecture of story and authenticity of character.
Well. Cripes. Looking back, some of the entries from the past two years are bloody dreadful.
I started off with a roar, as resolutions to become a better self and turn over the sour, scorched leaves of lax habits so often do. The first book I’ve recorded is Summer by Ali Smith. I’ve tried to slap down a sturdy, plain bread-slice of plot summary, topped it with the citrus peel twist and chocolate shaving of subjective opinion, then served it with the dazzling flambe of a few quotations from a Claire Wills review from The London Review of Books.
My handwriting, though, looks as if a thousand tiny black millipedes have been flattened on to the paper with a rolling pin. (I’m asking a lot of this small, recycled, 4B1 Warwick notebook my son used for drumming lessons, I can see now. If I’d splashed out on a beautiful Italian Castelli, would I have been more expansive, more painstaking and also more inclined to make my comments legible?)
The prose reads as if I’m racing to take notes from a speaker whose style leaps and zigzags like popcorn escaping a lidless pan. Perhaps a graphologist would decide, given all the abbreviations, strike-throughs and carets, that I was rushing to keep up with the speed of thought. In reality, I was hurrying to recall any plot before it faded. The rush was also because, after I’d tried to close with a summary ("a fragmented, yet easily readable novel that philosophises about human connection + cruelty + politics + time + family + love and art") a familiar feeling descended. Do other book-nuts get this? It was a yearning restlessness; sweet dissatisfaction; a kind of hopeful pressure; a need to keep searching.
As I flick through past that first page, hunting for an entry that lives up to my ambitions for the journal, I give zero stars to the one that says, "re-reading Runaway by Alice Munro. Tried [a prize-winning novel] but gave up around page 70. So badly edited, I couldn’t get past that."
No stars, either, for the entry that only says, "on Kindle:" then lists five titles with no other information. Also none for this fairly useless entry: "I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell. Excellent memoir/essays about 17 brushes with death." Major fail! That tells me even less than the blurb would.
I might grudgingly give another entry one star, because at least my feelings are clear: "26 Feb 2021, stopped reading [A Novel] by [A Writer] because the mother was too unrelievedly criticised - the narrator seems monstrously negative - I’m up to page 89 and it just seems whiningly hectoring and bleating. Life’s too short to finish whingey books."
On the flip side, there are entries I’d grudgingly give a few silver (not gold) stars. If there was room here, I’d share everything I wrote about David Vann’s stunning feat of empathy and narrative shape in Halibut Moon and on Richard Powers’ recent ecologically-minded, structurally tight, psychologically acute Bewilderment, or on what left me feeling listless in both a lauded Aotearoan memoir, and Salena Gooden’s ambitious first novel Mrs Death Misses Death. I’d lay out what I learnt from the runaway bestseller My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkar Braithwaite, or from the subtle, compelling meditation on our interconnectedness in Happiness by Aminatta Forna; I’d explain my sulk over a selection of poetry by the Argentinian Alfonsina Storni, and how that was alleviated by the luminous work of Ada Limon.
Many of the other journal entries I’d censor: they digress into the far too personal. Yet that has also been one of the quiet joys in writing it. I can be rigorously honest, because it’s written for my eyes only, as I try to understand why some books move and astonish me, expand my thinking, make me want to grow more limber in my own writing, and others - despite all their hype, short-listings and even prizes - perplexingly, don’t.
Sometimes, of course, hype is actually a spell for anti-climax. We go into a book anticipating transcendence and uplift, yet the real thing is not even a speckled mirror of its publicity.
One example of that for me was Patricia Lockwood’s first novel No One’s Talking About This, about which I’d heard and read "leaving-the-stratosphere"-level accounts. I was already keen to read it after loving her memoir Priestdaddy, being shaken and exercised by her sardonic, fierce, gymnastically arch poem "Rape Joke", and feeling in awe of her work for London Review of Books, where her reviews throw a full readerly cabaret: comic, imaginative, casual, yet also erudite, idiosyncratic, caustic.
Yet in April this year, I found myself plunging, recklessly, into a rant before I’d even finished reading the book: "Hating it halfway through! It’s trying to both critique social media/the internet or the "portal" (as she calls it) and yet "be" the portal ... it’s meant to be satirical and funny, but I find it, so far, uneasily sneery and smug. Trying to both be superior to, but also to mirror the "extreme" comments from people on Twitter, etc.??? It’s trying to critique the constant irony and shallowness but somehow just swamps us with the same jittery constant smart-arse punchline, followed by smart-arse punchline??? Don’t we read books to get away from this hyper online, over-caffeinated, over-sugared and over-enraged hothouse???"
There’s a wince-inducing irony in my intemperate eruption of rhetorical questions, excessive punctuation and in the fact that, like a doom-scrolling dilettante, I never completed my entry.
As a piece of literary criticism, my note is bollocks (unsupported with quotations; no evidence that I finished the book; doesn’t reflect on whether its second half redeems its first). Yet it earns a double fist-pump: because I realise I know the narrative gets (grimly) better when, in its second half, real tragedy strikes. So even that inadequate note has served its purpose. I remember the novel!
