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.

The FAQ Part II

Continuation of the FAQ:

Which ones have been your favorites so far? I consider may favorites to fall into two categories: 1) ones that are fun to read (Love in a Cold Climate, Lord of the Rings, Dracula) and 2) ones that I wouldn’t have read without a push from the list, and that I am so glad that I have read.

I think the latter list is more interesting: The Ground Beneath Her Feet (some of the passages were so painfully beautiful that I had to stop reading and just breathe), The Red Queen (the Queen’s voice is distinctive and so fully realized; I read the rice chest piece coming home from work late one night, and I was shaky), The Forsyte Saga (yes, it’s long, but it is worth it; I had no idea what I was getting into when I started it, and it’s portrayal of the changing meanings of marriage, of the different ways love takes shape; I can’t articulate my love for this book in only a few words); Pale Fire (so hilarious; if you want something fun, go read this one); and many others (Remains of the Day; Never Let Me Go; Count of Monte Cristo; The Wings of the Dove; All Quiet on the Western Front)

Are there any books that you've wanted to stop? Yes.

All right, smarty, which ones? The Hunchback of Notre Dame, American Psycho, The Trial, Dr. Zhivago, The Unnamable, Molloy, Malone Dies. Sorry, Beckett aficionados and anyone else whose favorite books made this list. I would love to talk with you about why you didn’t hate every character in Hunchback, why the nihilist violence in American Psycho is more than just gratuitous, how you manage (if you manage) to not want to shove every character in a Kafka novel into a vat of hot oil, why there is anything romantic to be found in the suffering of Dr. Zhivago, and what in the world is happening in the Becket trilogy of “Oh my God, when will this end? Die, Malone, and put me out of my misery.”

What If you want to read something that isn't on the list? Then I do. The list is not meant to be restrictive. I definitely read the latest Mary Russel novel the day it was published. I also throw in non fiction on a fairly regular basis (in addition to the nearly 60 list books in 2010 thus far, I've also read Yes Means Yes, Dream City, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Undercurrents, Half the Sky, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up, and All The President's Men; I also read for a book club, and I read The Economist cover-to-cover weekly)

What if they update the list? I've decided it's like when you enter college. The degree requirements/list of books when you start applies throughout (technically I think in most colleges you can later choose the new reqs if you want, but I don't intend to update the list for myself).

My apologies to the authors whose names did not appear in the labels for this post (apparently only twenty can per post).