In Search of the "Unputdownable"

Remember Elizabeth Bachner of this post? She has a second article about reader's block up at Bookslut. She says,

There are good, or even great books that are hard to read or slow-going, and also bad, waste-of-time books that are a slog. There are brilliant books that are unputdownable, but also piece-of-shit, brain-rotting books that are unputdownable. How do we tell which is which? How do we sate our cravings without making ourselves sick? And how do we isolate those key ingredients that enhance flavor, and find them in wholesome forms?

I think that's a really interesting question. I've read a lot of books recently with plots that seem promising - the travelling circus (Water for Elephants), a brain injury that changes everything for the son of a genius (The Beautiful Miscellaneous), even The Memory-Keeper's Daughter, which was about a man secretly giving up his daughter with Down Syndrome before anyone knew she had been born. All of those ideas sound interesting, right? But the writing doesn't really live up to each book's fantastic plot.

I'm beginning to think that for me, the best books - those "brilliant books that are unputdownable" - are about the ins and outs of the everyday. But presented in language that thrills, language that awakens all the possibilities which exist in those everyday situations. Simply put, my "best books" are the ones that take our world and hand it back to us blown wide open with promise.

Whether the language of a book is stark and cynical (Bukowski), built on the stuttering rhythms of speech (McCarthy), perfectly precise (Austen), poetic and ridden with imagery (Eugenides), or playful and repetitive (Dickens), it's all about how it balances the plot.

The reason I find books like the ones I listed above mediocre is because the language doesn't live up to the plot. The "best books," the ones I come back to again and again, manage to find a balance between language that excites and enthrals, and plots which speak to something human and timeless.

Bachner worries about how to keep finding those "unputdownable" books, and I can sympathise. I have months where nothing I read is special or mind-blowing. Nothing makes me sit up and go, "Yes, this is it, exactly," which is the reaction I have when some writer describes something that I've always felt and never been able to put into words. But then, sometimes, I'll have that reaction in the most unexpected places. I just read John Kelly's The Great Mortality, a history of the Black Plague outbreak of 1347-50. I couldn't put it down. It was fascinating, terrifying and timely.

In the quest for the unputdownable books, it's always best to just keep reading. And sometimes to avoid the bestseller list and just pick up a book because you like the title.

Bookslut also has an interesting piece about Tolstoy and religion. I've only read Anna Karenina, but Levin's spiritual crisis in that novel is so sympathetically and realistically described that I found it revelatory. I even wrote a paper about it! I was planning to tackle War and Peace this summer but I don't know if I have enough time left (given that I haven't even finished Little Dorrit yet - I like the idea of reading one Dickens novel a summer, though...)