What do you recommend?

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.

Go Down, Moses; The Vicar of Wakefield; Under the Net; The Piano Teacher

Yeesh. I’m running behind. In my defense, it’s been a bit crazy. I also don’t have a great deal to say about any of these books (except Under the Net, but mostly I want to say, go read it!), s this should work as one post. As always, spoiler warning for the texts in question.

Oh, Faulkner. I don’t really know what to do with you. I actually really enjoyed The Sound and the Fury. It wasn’t until I had finished it that I read somewhere that it is supposed to be difficult, which I think is unfair. It’s exquisite in this very raw and painful way. It’s a tragedy both in that it is sad/almost depressing, and that it seems inevitable. I’m still a bit afraid of Faulkner, though, and Go Down, Moses didn’t help that. I can’t see it as a novel, try as I might. I can see it as interconnected short stories, but I’d love to talk with someone about it not as vignettes but as a single arching narrative. Because I just didn’t experience it that way. I didn’t connect with most of the stories, except The Old People, The Bear, and Go Down, Moses, itself; my favorite was the first of those three. It’s the one that finally pulled me in.

The Vicar of Wakefield was quite the change of pace. It’s old, of course, and you can certainly see that. It works best as a satire, I guess. I’m glad that it was short, since it got old near the end (one can only take so much of, “and then another catastrophe happened”). I also did not care for the Vicar at all. I sometimes wonder if I would have a very different sensibility if I had been born during that era, or if I would have chafed at the gender roles and expectations. Clearly, our sensibilities and identities are shaped at least in part by our cultural context, but at the same time people born within cultural norms are the ones who change and expand them, so I do wonder where I would have fallen with that (which is to say, I would make a pretty terrible pre-Victorian woman if I suddenly got kicked back in time). All of that acknowledged, I did appreciate the character of the second daughter and her romance. Nothing modern about either, per se, but still I found it admirable and appealing. The book might make a decent play, if you played up the humor.

Under the Net made me fall in love with Iris Murdoch. I read this book incredibly quickly, because it was so much fun. Who couldn’t love a story where a man decides to steal a movie star dog when he is essentially homeless all for an extremely muddled notion about holding it ransom when it is clearly more of a liability than an asset? I also loved all three women as characters. Murdoch created three dimensional characters that still had elements of caricatures, but that were also fully realized. They had their own desires and ambitions, and weren’t just accessories (maybe because this was the first female author I’ve read in a bit). This doesn’t even touch on the philosophy, which adds weight to what might otherwise seem almost frothy (though frothy is not an applicable adjective at all). It would be interesting to re-read the novel from the perspective of the philosophical debates within it as sort of a meta close read. The other way I’d turn this into an academic paper would be through the main character’s journey arc, also cast through the prism of the philosophical debates. Still trying to figure out to whom I could recommend this one, since I really enjoyed it, but I’m not sure who else would have the same connection.

The Piano Teacher has earned a dubious place on the books that I almost wanted to stop reading/books that I am mostly glad I have read because it means that I never have to face them again. I do not necessarily object to the portrayal of violence, even sexual violence in graphic detail, but this book was really hard for me to get through. I see plenty of the dark side of humanity without it being so thoroughly and singly portrayed in my reading choices. I went back and forth between which character I hated the most. I can admire the craft and the prose, but this one was hard for me and I’m so glad it is behind me. It did raise some interesting questions about why certain books are considered important/good, which I’ll discuss in a later post, though.

Reading the Fingersmith right now. Saw this twist coming, but it was still sort of shocking when it was actually upon me.