My sister lamented the other day that it's hard to consider oneself well read when one has moral scruples that render at least half the books out there unreadable. Sad, but true.
Most of the books I read come highly recommended by family members and friends, and the rest come from lists of the acknowledged classic literary endeavors—you know, 100 Books You Should Read Before You Go to College, Top 100 Books of All Time, etc. I have only made a few exceptions to these trends by picking some random book off a shelf when I knew little or nothing about it. One of them was Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, and another was Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. Both of them turned out to be smashing hits for different reasons, but they could both be classified as "coming of age" stories.
"Coming of Age" used to be considered its own genre, it seems. Most of the books for teens and young adults prior to, and even after, the publication of the Harry Potter series, would fall into that category. The designation itself is almost derogatory. A middle school librarian friend of mine told me that when kids come to her for book recommendations, she always wanders the shelves with them and gives them lots of options. She's really good at that. But she told me that any time she mentioned a book as a "coming of age" story, it was sure to be left on the shelf rather than checked out.
There are so many factors that go into deciding to read or not to read. I almost never go by the summary on the back. I don't know who writes those things, and even if they've gotten a little better in recent years, they need to seek other jobs because they're botching the job they currently have. If anything, the summaries are what kill my enthusiasm after being drawn to a particular book due to pretty cover art, an intriguing title, or any of those other immediate recommendations.
Why does it take so much persuasion to get someone to read a book? Orson Scott Card wrote several books on writing, and I'm going to slightly modify one of his comparisons to state that reading a book you don't like could easily compare to going on a road trip with someone you don't like. The average book takes about ten hours to read, and who wants to spend ten whole hours with someone or something they just don't care about? And after you've been on two or even three road trips with really annoying people, wouldn't you start to hate road trips? Just like if you've read two or three stupid books before you've read many good ones, you'd start to hate reading.
Sometimes I am surprised at the number of kids and adults who still do like to read, all things considered—including those ridiculously saccharine and badly-written stories we were all tortured with as children. Fortunately for me, the first book I can remember having been read to me as a child (in kindergarten) was about Darby O'Gill stealing gold from the leprechauns and getting home to realize it had all fallen out through a hole in his pocket. If Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is the only thing standing in the way between a kid and the recess playground, it's no wonder some kids hate books. I guess it made a difference to me that in kindergarten, I didn't like being in unleashed, unstructured times and places with lots of other kids. Even then, I preferred books to people.
It's easy to know where you stand with a good book. Reading books came easily to me; reading people didn't. First grade was fabulous (that was back when we didn't learn to read until first grade). I remember learning how to read, and feeling like I was finally good at something and that school might actually be worth it after all. Seriously, I wonder if that wasn't one of the best years of my life. But that was the same year I figured out I didn't understand other kids. I thought I was playing a game with a girl in my class during recess when she suddenly asked me why I was following her. This is undoubtedly very silly of me, but starting at that moment, I lost all confidence that other people wanted me around, and the only friends I've had have been the ones who have been very obvious about initiating a friendship.
I wonder if it's only in books that people are brought together by mutual love of books. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which sounds utterly inane when you just consider the title but is actually one of the more delightful novels I've read recently, has a character who is not very educated but who has developed a taste for Jane Austen. In correspondence, she writes that "reading good books spoils you for reading bad ones."
Books are like everything else, I suppose. I forget whose law it is who said that 95% of everything is crap. But I don't feel very secure in saying that, because I have attempted to write several books myself, and I would hate for them to turn out crap. We can take inspiration from the statement of Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille when he says that "the average piece of junk is worth far more than our criticism designating it so." He also says that "the work of a critic is easy." I used to take issue with that, because I spent a good part of four years learning to be an intelligent critic. Now, I'm not so sure. There is a place for intelligent criticism, just as there is a place for flawed, or even failed, attempts at creation.
Because that is what a book is: a very lovely form of creation.
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