Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction

I’ve been reading a lot in recent months, but I have not even been thinking about writing book reviews. Usually, when I read novels and short stories, I have a review developing in my head. I may be wrong about this, but I think of it as being a bit like a background program running on a computer.

Unusually for me, I have not been reading all that much fiction. The exception is beautiful children’s books, like Where Ocean Meets Sky by Eric Fan and Terry Fan. But that’s a post for another day. I’ve read non-fiction books from memoir to philosophy to texts for professionals in fields that are not mine. I’m gaining a lot of information. I’m synthesizing ideas and stories, studies and research.

Some of these books are better than others, but they are not exactly comparable. Taking into account their goals, I could develop evaluative criteria, or I could write about my reading experiences. I have read many book reviews of nonfiction, and they’re often quite helpful in directing my reading. I could write reviews myself. But the thought never occurs to me as I read, and when I consider the idea consciously, it holds no appeal.

What I can do, and find myself doing in a range of contexts, is recommend specific books or articles to individuals based on their questions or experiences. I can also pull key examples and pieces of information from this kind of reading and incorporate them as relevant into casual conversations. That’s very different than a book review, because what I have to say is evoked by the context. For me, reading nonfiction simply does not create a void waiting to be filled with a book review.

I titled this post “Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction,” but it might be more accurate to title it" “Why I read fiction part 1.” The nature of my engagement is inherently more active when I read fiction.

As much as I am curious and liable to become fascinated by all sorts of ideas and topics, the automatic book review program is not triggered except by fiction.

Unfinished summer reading and the advantages of a hard copy

I once picked up a bright orange copy of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley while on vacation, having enjoyed the first couple of pages in an air conditioned bookstore. I brought it to the beach and read, drunk on heat and bightness, my head swimming. My eyes were half dazzled by the reflection from the water, even as I shaded the just-off-white pages in order to read in the glare.

As Mr. Ripley considers whether to kiss or murder Dickie Greenleaf, on a boat, the scene I imagined was permeated by the same heat and sun and rhythm in which I read, though my water was colder. I can feel the bone chill of the water in my ankles, from my eventual run into the waves.

That is one kind of quintessential summer reading experience, though I did finish this thriller immediately.

Another is my reading of a John le Carre spy nove,l the title of which I cannot remember, beside the pool. I spent a few summers at a few different pools reading the book, its cover curled and its pages bearing evidence of the splashes and the sun. In between, the book spent at least one winter in the trunk of my car, baking and freezing. My Kindle app on my phone is probably where I put in the most fiction reading time, my Kindle is sturdy, but not that sturdy. The printed book has some unbeatable features.

I have not yet finished this novel and I’m not sure who is spying on whom, though I do remember enough that I want to get back to this story, even, hopefully, this particular copy. I think it’s still in a bag with some goggles, organized not by author or genre but by the context of reading.

Many of my most memorable summer reads have never been finished, and they’re not all thrillers and spy novels. Anna Karenina and The Brother’s Karamazov both qualify as summer reading in my personal system. Who has time to read massive books like that, unassigned, while studying English and therefore having stacks of assigned texts? I started Anna Karenina one summer in high school and read over half before school started back up in the fall. I always meant to return to it, though extensive Russian novels are are rarely my top reading pursuit. Tellingly, when I decided for reasons unknown to read another one during down time at an art gallery job during grad school, I started The Brother’s Karamazov. I was almost relieved when the semester started and I could freely abandon the extensive philosophical discussions that dominate my memory of the book.

Summer reading is determined by the context of the reading experience, by the way the book promises to fill unstructured months, by how well the dazed feeling of being overheated accompanies the plot, and by whether the book can be catalogued with swim gear.

Why is reading a book only once the norm?

I used to think it was lazy of me to re-read. There’s definitely a certain kind of energy that is not required upon a second or third read.

But that energy doesn’t mean the first read is superior to subsequent reads. Making a particular cake for the first time takes more energy than subsequent bakes, and it is not generally considered a lazy waste of time to make the same cake a second, even a third time. People are celebrated for perfecting particular cakes, even.

After all, the first bake is high risk. Are all of the ingredients included in the ingredient list? No. You have to carefully read through extensive discussion about how beaten a moderately well beaten egg should be to discover that you need vanilla—and, oh, approximately 2 tablespoons of boiling water in which to dissolve the espresso powder that you have discovered is fused into a hockey puck. There you are, mid-egg-beating, attacking the hockey puck with an ice pick while boiling water and trying to get the vanilla lid unstuck.

Such are the perils of following a recipe for the first time. You learn a lot and with luck the result is enjoyable. But clearly baking that cake next time will go more smoothly, unless you wait so long you forget everything you learned the first time.

Reading a book for the first time is, likewise, fraught with peril. Some may spend their energy distracted by worries about a character they like who seems determined to make bad choices. I’m talking to you, Anita Brookner heroines. Others may read a book about family and love and despair stubbornly focused on global warming because that’s the significant lens for them at that time. I’m talking to you, theoretically-minded readers. Perhaps the likeliest distraction is simply ploughing through to the end to “find out what happens.”

Clearly a second or third read presents an opportunity for a new experience, and who is to say that it’s the first read that matters most? If re-reading is lazy, surely it is a laziness to embrace.

19th c Canadian Chick Lit

Lucy Maud Montgomery is (long)* 19th Century Canadian juvenile chick lit, and I love her.

One of the best trips of my life was a family vacation that included Prince Edward Island and its delightful Green Gables, and Lover’s Lane, and the house with the dress that Montgomery once wore, as an adult with a waist smaller than I had as a skinny high schooler. The lupines were everywhere and they were in bloom, and the potatoes were fantastic.

Like many other girls, I read Anne of Green Gables, and going to the place is a highlight of literary travel I recommend to anyone who cares for Anne with an e.

I recently read Montgomery’s Christmas Stories. I used the app Serial and read one story of baked goods and snow and boarding houses and, of course, Christmas generosity each day.

The generosity in these stories typifies the genre, and it must be unexpected. People turn out to be better than you think, at least for a day. That is a key ingredient in a nineteenth century heartwarmer, along with, I now realize, a Christmas plum cake.

*Edited to add: one day I’ll have to write about the long 19th century concept. Suffice it to say that Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908.

Current Reading at the end of 2020, a partial list

As the year comes to an end, and everyone else is posting what they have completed in 2020, I’ll share a dozen (OK, a baker’s dozen) of my current books with a few selected quotes that help explain why I read so many books at once.

1. Christmas Stories by Lucy Maud Montgomery

   Characteristic quote:

   It was the dusk of Christmas Eve and they were all in Jean Lawrence's room at No. 16 Chestnut Terrace. No. 16 was a boarding-house, and boarding-houses are not proverbially cheerful places in which to spend Christmas, but Jean's room, at least, was a pleasant spot, and all the girls had brought their Christmas presents in to show each other.
   *Note: This collection is on the app Serial and the Kindle edition on Amazon is at least similar.

2. Last Seen Wearing an Inspector Morse mystery by Colin Dexter

3. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

   Characteristic quote:

   A dark enormous form ran onto the meadow. No one was in sight…I had the impression that it was a deer…I ran into the grass. There lay a dead deer.…Someone was poaching.

5. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver

   Characteristic quote:

   Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy… “Azure”

6. The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt

7. Saga, volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

8. The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun Wang

9. Murder on Youngers Creek Road by Gary P. West

10. Elsie Dinsmore by Martha Finley

    Characteristic quote:

    "Dear papa, I am so sorry I have been so naughty," she murmured, leaning her head against the arm of his chair, while the tears rolled fast down her cheeks; "won't you please forgive me, papa? it seems to me I can't go to sleep to-night if you are angry with me."

11. The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang

    Characteristic quote:

    Saina sat behind the wheel of the parked car, a hand-me-down Saab that the house’s previous owner —a widowed theater director who couldn’t take the upstate winters anymore—had left behind along with an attic full of furniture and a shed piled with buckets of unapplied weather sealant.

12. Productions of Mrs. Maria Stewart: Presented to the First African Church and Society of the City of Boston by Maria Stewart

13. Dracula by Bram Stoker

    Characteristic quote:

    Strange and terrible as it is, it is true!

I read a lot of books at once in part because I read for lots of different reasons. I might be working on a project that asks me to review a strangely popular nineteenth century children’s book (#10 above), or I might want to spend half an hour thinking about train tables and an alibi I already know to be faked (#2). I might be reading something with my kids (#3, #4).

But what if I want something else? Well, there’s a poetry collection (#5). There’s a comedic romp that is also a social commentary (#11). And so on.

Some are re-reads, and some I might not finish. I might set one aside and return to it after months or years. I haven’t read So Much Blue by Percival Everett in a sustained way in a long time, and it isn’t on the list above in part because of that, but 2021 could be the year I return to it.

Is it possible to read “too many” books at once?

Before I went everywhere with a loaded digital book device, I would always choose the wrong book. I would go to the airport with one book and before my flight left, I would know it was the wrong book, and I would buy something different. I once did this and then foolishly lent my new purchase to a fellow traveler with nothing to read at all. I then spent the rest of the flight—a decently long one—struggling and failing to read the book I originally selected for the trip.

I read a lot, but I do other very time consuming things too, like cook, draw, teach, and amuse my kids. The question of whether it’s possible to be reading “too many” books at once is not a question about spending more or less time reading.

Some people, including readers more avid than I, read one or two books at a time. Intellectually, I have always known this to be true. I have not always been fully aware of this on an emotional level.

“I’m going to try not to read so many books at a time,” a colleague confessed, as we chatted about changes we might make after a workshop on mindfulness and academic life. I was intrigued by this resolution, as it was frankly not one that had occurred to me over the course of the workshop.

“How many do you normally read at once?” I asked innocently.

I am not sure what number she admitted to—maybe three or four. Maybe five or seven. She wanted to pare that down!?!

I read so, so many more books at a time.

Part of the difference is semantic: if I start a book a few times before committing or rejecting it, it’s on my list. If I’m re-reading two or three or four books, maybe just late at night or before my morning coffee, maybe just on the weekend, that counts. If I’m re-reading part of a text that I’m studying or reading a batch of books for an upcoming course, that counts too. To say that I’m reading these books, even if someone else wouldn’t “count” them, is not the result of a desire to inflate my “current reading” count.

This isn’t a matter of virtue or commitment.

If not that, then what? To be currently reading a book is to hold that book in mind, the shape of it, my sense of it, my expectations of it, my perhaps faulty memories of past reading experiences, my anticipation of a range of interpretations or receptions the book might have gotten or might get… or these overlapping ideas and feelings hover in reserve at the edge of my mind. If this all sounds awful, my colleague’s goal of reducing the list of books in the current reading stack is an excellent resolution.

But for me, being limited to a few books would prevent me from reading. My book would always be the wrong book for the moment. When I’m reading many books, I don’t have this problem. One of them is ready for me, or I am ready for one of them. Or I just start another book.

Family Poems: Wind

Wind poems are perfect for fall. Lately, we’ve enjoyed some classics like Christina Rossetti’s Who Has Seen the Wind and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wind.

I am tempted to wax eloquent about about wind, or perhaps fall, or maybe poetry. Trying to catch a leaf before it hits the ground is satisfying. So is staying inside and listening to the power of the wind from the other side of a wall.

In some initially related poetry googling, we found a new favorite The Everything of Everything by Shu Cai.

We can’t seem to finish Percy Bysshe Shelly’s Ode to The West Wind. Maybe next year.

Family Book Review: The Water Dragon

Sometimes it’s the story that makes a book special, and sometimes it’s the story of how we come to a book. Last summer on a family road trip vacation, we went to the beach, visited family, and checked out city sites. This should be the perfect vacation, right? Something for everyone!

The kids loved this trip. Especially the public library where we stopped to break up the drive home, which is where we stumbled upon Ji Lian’s The Water Dragon: A Chinese Legend.

This is truly an any age tale, timeless, and crafted to not include any “ripping kids from their parents” elements. We like the illustrations too.

This is a great read for those with an interest in Chinese dragons, and a good intro to them for those already interested in the dragons of Western stories.

What do we mean when we say “The Classics”?

Confession time: I’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye. I figure it’s been read so many times by so many people, that it doesn’t really need to be read by me. It’s nothing personal, Holden. I’m sure it would be a pleasure to finally meet you in person, so to speak, after hearing so much about you over the years. One day, I might pick up Catcher and read it. I read Slaughterhouse Five on a whim a few months ago, so there is always hope.

I probably escaped Catcher, or it eluded me, because I was homeschooled, and my parents and their educational philosophy never happened to lead to it. I read some weird stuff in the coming-of-age stage when other people read Catcher, everything from a random Civil War diary I found on my history-loving grandfather’s shelf to all of Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries.

I definitely read some of “The Classics,” too, whatever that means. It’s a bit like the famous Supreme Court case and the pornography: you know it when you see it. And see it again and again, on bookshelves and on lists of what everyone should read or does read or has read. If you get a point for it because you’ve read it on an list on the Internet, it just might be a classic. Or not. It might be a new popular book, like The Hunger Games (which I haven’t read) or Beloved (which I have). It might be a more obscure book, quite possibly one included on the list to add “diversity.”

So let’s end with this: here are three must-read, readily available 19th century American books. Two that aren’t “classics,” or maybe they are, depending on how you look at it, and one that is definitely “a classic,” but somehow instead of reading it, everyone was reading Catcher in the Rye:

1. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

2. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account if Her Call to Preach the Gospel

3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin