One danger of this project is that people seem to think that I should be a good source for book recommendations. This is very unfair, in my opinion. I don’t even like giving restaurant recommendations! I recently read an interesting article on Salon that argued that there are two different kinds of book recommendations, which I argee with wholeheartedly.
The first springs from the book review. Here, the reviewer offers her/his opinion of the work, perhaps recommending it in an abstract sense. The review is targeted at a general audience, however, not a specific individual, and more presents the reviewer’s thoughts and less tells the review reader that he/she should go out and read the book.
I can get behind that sort of recommendation (I give my thoughts on the various works in this blog, after all). It’s the second type of recommendation that makes me nervous. I liked The Sound and the Fury and The Idiot, after all.
This second type is the personalized recommendation. When someone asks e to tell her/him what to read based on what I’ve read, the person isn’t actually asking for my personal opinion, per se, but rather my thoughts on what he/she might think/like. This is a lot of pressure, particularly since I think people expect me to have a different taste in books than I do.
My love for God of Small Things, for example, has caused a number of people to read it. Most have told me they found it depressing and violent. Which it is, of course; I find it so beautiful, so painfully exquisite, that I have a hard time intelligibly discussing it. The repeated phrases! The way it mirrors a Kathakali dance! The unflinching pain! But it’s not for everyone, and you have to understand that I like that sort of thing.
Similarly, while no one has ever taken my Forsythe Saga or The Ground Beneath Her Feet recommendations seriously, I think there’s a not minuscule chance they’d be disappointed if they did. It took me a bit to start appreciating Rushdie, and if you just jump into The Ground Beneath Her Feet, you might feel like I felt about The Satanic Verses – I appreciated that one, but didn’t love it.
For people that I know well, I volunteer recommendations if after reading a book I think the person would like it (and I did succeed in getting people to read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Red Queen, among others, but they weren’t the same person, and I wouldn’t cross recommend). I’m still trying to find the right person to whom I should recommend Under the Net.
If pressed, I tend to just cite my favorites, but the art of recommending books is complicated, particularly if you don’t understand why I like what I like (my movie taste is similarly unexpected for most people, as I have been told by multiple individuals). I’ll try to write a post explaining my literary tastes in a bit.
Showing posts with label Arundhati Roy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arundhati Roy. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
The Task: Read every book on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list before dying.
The Impetus: A combination of two factors, really. The first was actually reading the list and realizing I had read 76 titles on it. Depressing. I consider myself a fairly avid reader, and granted I’ve read way more books that are not on the list, but still. 76? Really?
The second factor was an English class I took in college. The class itself wasn’t super inspiring in some ways (most people treated it the way most people treat book clubs; yeah, we’re here to talk about books, but does that really require reading them first? All the way to the end? Really?), but the professor and the books were great. I read and fell in love with Beloved and God of Small Things, two books I hadn’t planned to read before taking the class.
After graduating college and realizing that my life and mind were my own again, I wanted to use my new liberty to read voraciously books of my choosing. But I also wanted to continue to read authors and styles that I wouldn’t normally choose if I was basing my selections solely on what I thought I would like before even trying the book (it’s like eating; my life would be sadly falafel free if I didn’t try food that looked completely unappetizing at first; sometimes books are the same way).
The juxtaposition of these two factors gave rise to the quest. I’m currently reading book 157 (The Idiot), and am on schedule to finish by the time I am 35 if I keep to my 2010 (to date) pace. I likely won’t.
The Blog: When I explain the project to people, they always tell me I should write a blog about this. People keep saying that novels and print are dying, and now they say that blogs are, too, so why not bring them together? Really, I have no good reason for this and I expect I won’t keep it up. But now I can have a better response when people tell me to keep a Blog on the books I’ve read.
The Rules:
Rule Number One: If you start, you must finish.
This is the most important rule, and the foundation on which this whole project is based. Without it, everything crumbles. Just like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to never making it through the Russian masters is paved with letting yourself “come back to it later” (a phrase which I unapologetically put in quotation marks, because it really means, “never revisiting Larissa Feodorovna Guishar and trying to forget if we want the Reds or the Whites to win”).
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and in my next installment (the FAQ) I’ll write about the time (just once thus far) that I have broken this rule.
Rule Number Two: No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.
So the whole canon of Edith Wharton is not on the list. So you’d rather read The Wind Done Gone than Margaret Mitchell’s (discouragingly) lengthy tome. So what? The Custom of the Country is not, and never will be, The Bunner Sisters. Get over it. This is not a quest to read books written by authors who appear on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, it’s a quest to read the list.
Rule Number Three: Books are not Movies
This one I think is pretty obvious, but clearly I actually have to read the book. The Wishbone adaptation and the Wikipedia article don’t cut it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be facing Don Quixote.
Those are really it. The first one is the most significant. The other two are basic to the very spirit of the project. Everything else about how I tackle the list will be covered in the FAQ. Which I may never write, because I am a fickle, fickle person, and this may be the one and only post on the quest.
The second factor was an English class I took in college. The class itself wasn’t super inspiring in some ways (most people treated it the way most people treat book clubs; yeah, we’re here to talk about books, but does that really require reading them first? All the way to the end? Really?), but the professor and the books were great. I read and fell in love with Beloved and God of Small Things, two books I hadn’t planned to read before taking the class.
After graduating college and realizing that my life and mind were my own again, I wanted to use my new liberty to read voraciously books of my choosing. But I also wanted to continue to read authors and styles that I wouldn’t normally choose if I was basing my selections solely on what I thought I would like before even trying the book (it’s like eating; my life would be sadly falafel free if I didn’t try food that looked completely unappetizing at first; sometimes books are the same way).
The juxtaposition of these two factors gave rise to the quest. I’m currently reading book 157 (The Idiot), and am on schedule to finish by the time I am 35 if I keep to my 2010 (to date) pace. I likely won’t.
The Blog: When I explain the project to people, they always tell me I should write a blog about this. People keep saying that novels and print are dying, and now they say that blogs are, too, so why not bring them together? Really, I have no good reason for this and I expect I won’t keep it up. But now I can have a better response when people tell me to keep a Blog on the books I’ve read.
The Rules:
Rule Number One: If you start, you must finish.
This is the most important rule, and the foundation on which this whole project is based. Without it, everything crumbles. Just like the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to never making it through the Russian masters is paved with letting yourself “come back to it later” (a phrase which I unapologetically put in quotation marks, because it really means, “never revisiting Larissa Feodorovna Guishar and trying to forget if we want the Reds or the Whites to win”).
Of course, rules are made to be broken, and in my next installment (the FAQ) I’ll write about the time (just once thus far) that I have broken this rule.
Rule Number Two: No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.
So the whole canon of Edith Wharton is not on the list. So you’d rather read The Wind Done Gone than Margaret Mitchell’s (discouragingly) lengthy tome. So what? The Custom of the Country is not, and never will be, The Bunner Sisters. Get over it. This is not a quest to read books written by authors who appear on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list, it’s a quest to read the list.
Rule Number Three: Books are not Movies
This one I think is pretty obvious, but clearly I actually have to read the book. The Wishbone adaptation and the Wikipedia article don’t cut it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be facing Don Quixote.
Those are really it. The first one is the most significant. The other two are basic to the very spirit of the project. Everything else about how I tackle the list will be covered in the FAQ. Which I may never write, because I am a fickle, fickle person, and this may be the one and only post on the quest.
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