This week's #FictionFriday is brought to you by David Fell
It can be perilous to make a recommendation. You say to someone “This is one of my favourite books!” or “This is a great book!” or “You should read this one!” and they read it and they hate it.
Have they judged you, as well as the book?
Perhaps it is wise to spend time learning others’ reading habits before you shoot from the hip. It only took me two or three decades to learn the sort of thing my mother prefers to read. These days I know that it would be foolish to suggest she read the recently-translated non-linear masterpiece of contemporary feminism that recently caught my tail. She wants nothing more than a well-written story and some interesting characters and a beginning and a middle and an end.
And I am much more cautious, too, about recommendations made to me. Especially those in newspapers. Too many reviews – and, again, it only took me two or three decades to work it out – are unreliable because they have been written by people with at least half an eye on the review they themselves hope to secure when their own book is published in a few months’ time.
I have been told that one of the reasons book clubs are so popular is that they embrace and then subvert this problem. A (relatively) mixed group of people take it in turns to choose a book, so everyone, over the course of time, has an equal opportunity to love/hate a book and a similar opportunity to have their own choice hated or loved. It all evens out.
I recall an episode, perhaps as many as three or four decades ago, when a group of young people sat outside a pub in south London and concluded they all had plenty in common because they were all roughly the same age and had similar educational and class backgrounds and had grown up in the same country and so on and so forth. We wondered what stories we had in common, what books we must all have read.
It turned out there were only four. It was amazing. I think there were five of us, and every time we thought ‘Ha! this must be the one!’ one person would confess that, in fact, despite the book being stupendously famous or ‘a classic’ or enormously insightful into the predicament of a group normally marginalised in some way or simply the sort of book you think that everyone has read – er, no. Not everyone. All too often the overlap is much smaller than we suppose. It turns out that a thing we might call a ‘shared culture’ is not so shared at all.
It turned out there were only four. It was amazing. I think there were five of us, and every time we thought ‘Ha! this must be the one!’ one person would confess that, in fact, despite the book being stupendously famous or ‘a classic’ or enormously insightful into the predicament of a group normally marginalised in some way or simply the sort of book you think that everyone has read – er, no. Not everyone. All too often the overlap is much smaller than we suppose. It turns out that a thing we might call a ‘shared culture’ is not so shared at all.
Which gets me to a point. In these febrile times, when more-or-less everyone is a photo-journalist-cum-artist/writer-in-their-own-residence, it seems to me that the most important attribute is vigilance. Be vigilant towards the recommendations coming your way: who is this person? Why are they recommending this rather than that? You don’t have to be suspicious (unless, of course, they are) merely attentive to the context. We all do it some of the time: think about how distinctive it feels when someone who really knows you makes a recommendation to you; or how it feels when such a well-founded recommendation turns out to be a disappointment.
And in reverse, too. How well-founded are your own recommendations? Have you considered the context in which your recommendation will be received? Are you really recommending something that will help someone learn/think/laugh/grow, or are you recommending something that simply signals your erudition/virtue/attention to the zeitgeist? (So, maybe not just vigilance: vigilance with integrity.)
Sadly, I cannot recommend the four books we identified all those years ago, even with the highest degree of self-vigilance, for the simple reason I have forgotten.
Not all of them, mind. One was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl; and another was Animal Farm by George Orwell. The other two: no idea.
I do remember, though, that we decided (and this was well before book clubs were a thing) that we would read a fifth book. (I think we were just shocked that we could only get to four.) And we all agreed that we would read the new book by Margaret Atwood. Which, in 1985, was something called The Handmaid’s Tale.
It was quite good as I recall. So too the Dahl and the Orwell. I can, I think, confidently recommend all three of these books…
