While it is true that not every book is for every reader, it also may well be that not every reader is meant for every book.
The concept came to mind while reading Adam O'Fallon Price's essay at The Millions about Hard to Get: Books That Resist You. Price writes about trying to read books that one wants to read, but which one never manages to do.
There is a type of book, I find, that falls in this category: books that resist you. This is different from books you think are bad, or books you don’t want to read. These are books you want to read, but for some reason are unable to. These are books that, if anything, you somehow fail, not being up to the task.
This is not the same as not being the right time for a book to find you. There are some books that are meant to be read at certain times during one's life. There also are books that resonate in different ways over the years. Rebecca Mead writes brilliantly about that concept in My Life in Middlemarch, a wonderful book about how a magnificent novel changes as one grows.
As someone who believes in reading widely and deeply, because of what such reading tells me about myself and others, I do acknowledge there are books that resist me. It's not that I don't want to read them. Some I don't expect to enjoy. But I do want to see what I can learn about myself or the world by reading them.
The first works that came to mind in this category for me are books by Jonathan Franzen. I gave up on The Corrections about the time one of the sad sack brothers stuck a fish in his clothes to shoplift it, and ran into someone who wanted to chat as he was trying to get out of the store (Whole Foods?). An earlier part of the book caught my attention with the child who was enchanted by trains and who grew up to work with them. I think that was the father of the sad sack brothers. That's as much as I've ever gotten out of his work.
Part of why I want to try again some day is to see why Franzen is so highly considered by others. What do they see that I haven't found? It's not that I have to admire what's there. It's just that I want to discover what actually is there.
The idea in Price's essay that sometimes readers struggle with literary fiction because it doesn't have events didn't work for me. Activity in a narrative is both interior and exterior, just like the conflicts characters face. Sometimes, the interior activity, or exploration of thoughts and feelings, or description of what is before a character, takes the upper hand. Other times, it's just like Indiana Jones.
Neither extreme is better. It just depends on the story that the author needs to tell, and whether she has found the way to tell it that works best for the story.
For anyone interested in exploring some of the most intriguing literary fiction of the year, the Booker shortlist and the National Book Award long list for Fiction have been announced. The only book on both lists is Bewilderment by Richard Powers. On the surface, it looks like a book that will resist me. But maybe that's because I really want to finally read The Overstory first.
Links to book descriptions are from The Literate Lizard, our Readers and Book Lovers Tuesday diary partner.
For the Booker, the shortlist includes:
Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North
Damon Galgut, The Promise
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle
The National Book Award long list, including books I've greatly enjoyed, features:
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Lauren Groff, Matrix
Jakob Guanzon, Abundance
Laird Hunt, Zorrie
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Robert Jones, Jr., The Prophets
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum: Stories
Jason Mott, Hell of a Book
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
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