The other day a friend said “Will you do more book recommendations?” and I said, “Absolutely, when there is a book to recommend.” Because the fact is that a book that I am happy to recommend comes along probably twice a year. Perhaps three times a year if I stumble upon something from long ago that passed me by.
(On this note, I wanted so desperately to like Excellent Woman by Barbara Pym but got lost in a sort of silo of vicarage chat… shall I persist? I like the premise.)
Sure, there are books. And the books are fine, but the books that I like - correction - love, are very particular, written in a certain style about certain things. I suppose the thing they all have in common is a certain degree of insanity.
I can’t read genre fiction, that’s for sure. I can tell that Tana French is a fun and gifted author but I just slogged through The Wych Elm like a very, very old donkey. I enjoyed Slow Horses on TV but getting to the end of the book - for me - was like pushing a bag of misshapen concrete objects up a steep gradient.
I try and try and try with new books. Some books I have started but not finished recently: Lessons in Chemistry, Mercy Street, Tresspasses, Mr Cadmus, two things by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the aforementioned Barbara Pym. I didn’t even finish Ann Tyler’s latest, French Braid. There was nothing wrong with any of them. I just put them down one day and never picked them up again. I simply didn’t care what happened next - but it was not their fault, it was mine.
And I just don’t believe in recommending books that I haven’t loved. Book reviewers, sure, they have to review the damn book by Thursday or whatever so there’s something on the page. If they’ve got a book by a new author or they just felt a bit meh about the one that they read or they ever hope to get a decent review of their novel that they’re writing in between book reviews, they will probably err on the side of positive. Who are they to say, “This was actually kind of whatever, so maybe give it a miss”? And they cannot just read and read and read and read until they find a hit because they’ve got that novel to write and also real hits just don’t come along that often.
But now, thank god! Here is Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas. It’s not about Vladimir Putin, it’s about a woman. And, like all the best books, you don’t really need to know any more than that. The plot is completely irrelevant. Vladimir, (I am at 45%), is getting on for being very nearly as good as Fleishman is in Trouble. Not quite… but nearly. And what is Fleishman is in Trouble about? A marriage, I suppose. But that’s not the point.
With okay books, the words sort of plop about on the page, floating above it. They are mechnical bits, like iron filings or things torn out of a clock, stuck down on the page to convey basic information. With brilliant books it’s as if you can see what’s going on as you read, the words literally make a picture as you run your eyes along them, like a painting made out of a thousand fingerprints, or old stamps. You know what I mean. Vladimir is like this: do read it.
Currently watching Between the Covers which is great as it gives so many different views. I thought of you Esther as somebody picked Where the Crawdads Sing which I know you disliked, but they raved about. It's so hard recommending books when people have such different criteria. I feel people do have the tendency to put on their snobs hat, in the fear that an easy reading book they enjoyed won't be appreciated.
Absolutely loved fleishman is in trouble one of my faves