The fire of personal enthusiasm is what really makes for the best advice on what to read next, a quality rarely found in an ordinary book review. That burst of incandescent awareness and pleasure that only a good book can give us often becomes an uncontrollable desire to grab complete strangers by the lapels and demand that they, too, read this book, right now, on the double. Drop everything. Do it.
The best guides, then, aside from one’s intimates, whose tastes and habits are known and loved, are the authors whom one admires. So I am especially grateful to George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, and Henry Fielding, all favorites of mine whose recommendations in essays and criticism and occasional lists saved a lot of room on my dance card.
I think that this is exactly right. I guess that the only thing that I have to add is that you have to evaluate where the fire of personal enthusiasm is coming from--for instance, Papa Leopard, whose favorite genre is real life adventure books, perhaps particularly military adventure books. Those aren't my favorite kind of books, despite his overflowing fire of personal enthusiasm. Although I have read Endurance, because how can you be one of his children if you haven't done that?
How to figure out what to read, especially when you're just beginning to read, is a problem. I started with just shelves and shelves of Christian romance novels, because that's what my aunts read. Well, that was after I finished the teen section of the library. The teen section was uniformly awful. I wish someone had just told me to skip it and to go straight for the adult section (not the adult section in the romance sense, but in the not-teen-novel sense). Gosh, so many coming-of-age novels set in revolutionary America. Bleh. (This is not to say that all Young Adult literature is bad--I love Elizabeth George Speare and The Giver and Chaim Potok, which I'm pretty sure Ilana set me onto. But the stuff at the James V. Brown was pretty bad.)
Stearns has always been more clever than me. She found a top-100 novels list somewhere and started reading her way through it. I'm not sure how she knew that was a good idea, but it was a great one. Of course, there was, I'm sure, just some competitive motivation for it, because she's always ask me to check off how many of them I'd read and then compare our numbers.
I was introduced by many of my favorite authors now by friends--Robinson introduced me to Marilynne Robinson; Sayers introduced me to Jhumpa Lahiri; Hopkins introduced me to Muriel Spark and Laurie Colwin; Salinger introduced me to Ishiguro by giving me Remains of the Day for a birthday present one year. And the authors I read introduced me to other authors: Laurie Colwin recommended Barbara Pym; T.S. Eliot recommended St. John of the Cross; Graham Green recommended Shusaku Endo.
My roommate at the moment is lately out of college. She's reading lots of books that I love from my library--Robinson, Colwin, Paton, even Never Let Me Go, which I definitely didn't recommend, but do own. She's borrowing my books like nobody's business. And it's the most incredibly gratifying thing to share the books I love.
So dear readers, how do you know what to read next? How did you know what to read in the first place?
6 comments:
Mama Leopard:
"I just finished Palace Walk, a book Ilana read in her Islamic history class. Last night I read One Bullet for You, a true-life Christian book set in Nazi Germany. Now it's a Visit with the Sheikh, a true story of a woman living in Iraq in 1965. There you have it."
(She's quite a reader; can you tell where we got it from?)
I've recently taken to asking my friend, who is in a book club, what they are currently reading and if she likes it. Based on this method, I recommend The Art of Fielding (and I own it if you would like to borrow it).
Baseball?!
it's true! personal enthusiasm is the key. but that's not enough. plenty of people have told me "you must read x" and I just don't care--it has to be personal enthusiasm from someone who's taste you share/respect/admire.
ooops. that was me above.
I have a hard time figuring out what to read, because I feel like my style of literature is dissimilar to most of my friends. However, I have taken the advice of my friend Maya, who likes to read one "smart" book (something that takes you something or at least makes you think) and then one "silly" book (which is purely for pleasure and isn't out to improve your intellect.) And then repeat.
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