Book Oracle - Book Selection

Book selection made easy for book groups and readers.

Oracle: A person who delivers authoritative, wise, or highly regarded and influential answers.

The Dilemma: How To Choose From the Thousands
of Books Published Each Year.

BOOK SELECTION
Readers and discussion group leaders alike know the agonies of choosing THE book you or your group should read. In So Many Books, So Little Time Sara Nelson examines the odd reasons book junkies pick the books they do. She calls it "A memoir of reading."

As to why this self-proclaimed "bookaholic" reads, she says "Part of the appeal of books is that they are the cheapest and easiest way to transport you from the world you know into one you don't." When she picks up a book she is "grateful to have a window on the world I have just entered." Sometimes Nelson, after much agonizing, doesn't choose the book, it chooses her. We've all had that happen. The book just jumps out and cries, "Read me."

Sometimes this is a mistake. The "So Little Time" part of her title and her desire to have a powerful and rich reading experience, have led her to conclude that sometimes she should just stop reading. She calls the decision to stop reading an unsatisfying book a "rite of passage." She has given up her membership in the Clean Plate Club. " If I don't like it, I stop reading. "Knowing I don't have to finish ...makes me braver in making out-of-the-mainstream choices in the first place."

One thing no one could accuse Sara Nelson of doing is automatically reading "buzzed about" books. She turns up her nose at most bestsellers and popular but ordinary selections in favor of books that she hated to have end, like The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks.

Another discovery Nelson reveals is that timing makes a difference. She finds that if she reads a book long before or long after all the hype about it, she gets more out of it. When a "book has been discussed, reviewed, parsed by everybody but Adam on down, you lose more than just your ability to shut off the noise and come to your own conclusions, you also forfeit the joy of discovery." Perhaps this is why so many reading groups select seasoned favorites and rare gems.

An old book can help you recreate your life's calendar, the

author found, when she reread Nora Ephron's, Heartburn five years later. An old book can remind you of where and who you were in those days, and define a moment in your life.

Summer or Beach Reading is traditionally one big book, and one book only. Summer is the time book groups that adjourn from Memorial Day to Labor Day read blockbusters they can't get around to in their normally busy lives. Huge historicals and classics are popular. Some readers use the time to catch up on books they feel guilty about never having read. Proust and War and Peace, for example.

You have to have long stretches of uninterrupted time to read something like Edith Wharton's classic, The House of Mirth. This classic is, according to Nelson, "a treat—long, detailed, funny, depressing, meaningful story about a hollow society."...But "it wasn't meant to be read in fits and starts."

The big book (850 pages) that absolutely enthralled Hanson was written by a Dutch-born Brit called Michel Faber. She read a few pages of The Crimson Petal and the White and was so enchanted by his prose that she immediately hid the book from herself until she couldhibernate with it. The story continued to be so "delicious" that she had to ration her time with it. "Two more chapters, then I just have to take a shower," she told herself. This is the kind of book that is best read on holiday.

Sara Nelson rejects Jonathon Franzen's division of fiction reading into two models: literary, defined as difficult and slow as opposed to "the contract model" in which "the author and the reader tacitly agree that the purpose is to sustain a sense of connectedness." She approaches all novels for pleasure and connectedness and can usually find many themes that provide that sense of connectedness to the world that the reader craves.

Not only Nelson, but all of us have stumbled upon an author and found a soul mate. After that we devour everything they write. Nelson's soul mate was Elinor Lipman, whom critics have called "the contemporary Jane Austen." After reading her novel, Isabel's Bed, Sara Nelson sought out her first (and best), And Then She Found Me and all the subsequent ones as soon as they came out. Not that Lipman was so spectacular, but she struck a chord with Nelson that she compared to a childhood friend with whom "your relationship ebbs and flows."

The appendix to So Many Books, So Little Time, a year of passionate reading, contains three lists of books that Sara Nelson briefly reviews, including appendix C entitled "Must Read Pile"—books waiting for her beside her bed, none of them on anyone's best-seller list with the possible exception of Seabiscuit.

THE KIND OF BOOKS READERS LOVE DO EXIST. Even though traditional publishers are gradually dropping the Midlist (good books that are not bestsellers), don't despair. Owing to the growth of small presses and self-publishers, a whole new source of books that appeal to book clubs and discussion groups as well as the avid reader have come on the market. We have undertaken to help you ferret them out. We will sift through the offerings to find quality books, and award a Gem of the Month.