How I Read

Since I’ve been tallying my reading on Twitter, I thought I might explain it a bit. I don’t quite read books for a living, although most people seem to think that is what I do. In fact, I have two main responsibilities. One of them is to select books to be used at the DJ. I am, in the immortal words of 43, the Decider. The other is to edit the selected books. I do a bunch of other stuff too, but that needn’t concern us now. I do not spend my entire working life reading, in other words. I spend only about half my entire working life reading.

Books arrive on my pile on a regular basis, from all your general publishers, either electronically or as galleys. I have a couple of people weeding out the truly impossible, but otherwise anything goes. We have a generalist approach to selection, with an eye on our family values slash narrative loving audience that wants reading as entertainment. So, you might ask, what makes me any kind of expert on selecting for this audience? Good question. I’ve had plenty of staff readers over the years who have been totally lost in this. The thing is, all the books we consider are (about to be) published, meaning that they have already achieved some level of acceptance based on, presumably, an inherent publishability. That is, I’m not just choosing from every book written, but instead from every book published, meaning that the book at hand has already probably gone through an agent and an editor. This is the first obstacle for a lot of readers, because this means that a lot of what we read is perfectly fine on face; that is, it’s not so crappy that you can’t read it. But we know that already, so you can’t let that play into it. Also, publishers publish books for a variety of reasons that may be beside the point of that book itself. Let’s say they have an author they love who has done well for them in the past, from whom they have great hopes for the future, who writes a book this time out that is not up to snuff. They do their best to fix it up, but then they grit their teeth and publish it, knowing it’s not so great, but that it’s an investment in the future. That’s good for them, not good for me. I just need the book at hand. Also, there’s writers who, frankly, a lot of publishers hold their noses and publish because, for some unearthly reason, they sell despite their lack of quality. This works well for their bottom line, but again, not for me. I need the book at hand to be entertaining for my customers.

But still, why me? Well, let me put it this way. I have pretty good taste in books for the market for which I am choosing. (I can demonstrate this with marketing feedback.) I am a critic, in other words, fairly in tune with the people for whom I am criticizing. I have no idea why, or what training I’ve had to make that happen. I started reading the minute I was taught how and haven’t stopped yet, and I went to college and majored in English, and I like to write myself, but a lot of people are like that. I just happen to be a pretty decent reed in the wind. In many ways, I’m easy to please. I hardly ever guess the ending, and I prefer not to. I’d rather be tricked by the author than disappointed. I always mist up at the teary parts: I’m the most sentimentally sappy reader the DJ has ever had. Seriously. I want to have fun when I read, unless I’m reading, say, philosophy which can be a slog. The key thing is, when I read as a selector I do not read for someone else. I do not read thinking that someone else will like this book, even if I don’t. I don’t know if anyone can really do that. It’s very hard to have an opinion on something you don’t like, for which you have no taste. There are some exceptions to this, but it’s a decent enough rule of thumb. If I don’t like it, finis, the end, I don’t like it. I do occasionally read very good books that are simply not right for my audience due to content or structure, so I can like something I can’t use, but that’s fairly rare. The books I don’t like are the books I deem to be lousy. I can only judge with the taste that I have. Why pretend otherwise?

So, how to I make that judgment in practice? How do I decide that the book is not merely publishable (which, obviously, I already know) but that it is right for us? Putting aside questions of content, I know because I start reading, and if I’m enjoying myself, I keep reading. It’s as simple as that. At any moment if I don’t care what’s going to happen next in a story, it’s probably over (given considerations of being tired or needing to get a cup of coffee or take some other sort of break). I am driven by narrative, and when it comes to entertainment in fiction, I expect an author to do that driving. At the point where authors don’t, they’re not doing their job, at least insofar as providing general entertainment. Others I know (Sarrantino and Gaiman in their anthology collaboration, for instance) have talked about that “what happens next” essentiality. For most of us, that’s what writing is all about. (Which is why modernist experiments remained just that, experiments, and we all don’t spend a lot of time reading books that are, say, assembled from random newspaper clippings.)

I pick up the book and start reading. If I get to the end, I probably want to use that book. If I stop reading at any point, I don’t want to use it. That is my yardstick. Some books I read just a couple of chapters (I do feel that they all need about 50 pages or so, to get a decent feel for them), and some I read a quarter or half or more or less. I seldom finish a book I’m not thinking is usable. I am being paid to select winners, not to sit here and read all day for no purpose. I once wrote that up in an in-house memo: “There is only one rule, we read to fill slots.” That is, we have to find 24 good books a year. We are not reading, per se. We are finding 24 good books a year, and reading is the mechanism for doing that. There’s a big difference.

Nonfiction, by the way, has a whole different set of rules, but they need not concern us here because I don’t do nonfiction anymore. Used to, but not lately. Which is too bad, because I firmly believe that the brain needs a little bit of everything, but so it goes. I read my NF at home.

So I’m trying to be realistic in my Twitter tallying. I don’t count every book so that the numbers are fairly true in the end. I only tick over the odometer when I’ve read a bookful of material, which may take two or three books. By the way, I am not a terribly fast reader. I once took a speed reading course that ruined me for months. It had the same effect as a golf lesson: it made me think so much that I simply couldn’t do it anymore, and had to go off into the desert as penance. And I have carried over my toss-it philosophy to my home reading. Why waste time reading a book I don’t like? I mean, I doubt if there will be a pop quiz in the morning, plus life is short. This is advice I would give to anyone, aside from a need to grapple with the canon as a student of literature or anything else, to wit, just read the ones you like. There really is no pop quiz in the morning. You get no credit for sticking with a stinker. There’s plenty of good ones to hold you. Stick with them. That’s what reading is all about.