Judging a Book By Its Lover Read online

  Judging a Book by Its Lover

  A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere

  Lauren Leto

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  The Justice League of Ex-Teachers of Mine

  I. For the Love of Print

  Commercial Confessions

  The Bookshelf of the Vanities

  That Certain Bookstore Smell

  Ten Rules for Bookstore Hookups

  Rules for Public Reading

  Survival of the Nerdiest

  Oh, the Men You’ll Love

  II. Fan Fictions

  Harry Hardships

  The Rules of Book Club

  Petition to Change the Term from “Bookworm” to “Bookcat”

  Fan Letters

  The Spelling Bee

  Your Moveable Feast

  Little-Known Treasures

  Infinite Lies

  How to Write Like Any Author

  III. How to Fake It

  What Your Child Will Grow Up to Be If You Read Them…

  Stereotyping People by Favorite Author

  How to Fake It

  Strategies to Avoid Discussing the Major Plot Points of Any Novel

  A Gift Guide by a Bad Gift-Giver

  How to Speak Condescendingly About the Most Revered Authors/Literary Works

  The Written Word

  IV. Snark Bait

  Twitter-Sized Reviews of Memoirs

  Book Critic’s Bag of Tricks

  Give It to Me Cheap

  How to Succeed in Classifying Fiction Without Really Trying

  The Literati

  To Be Read

  Afterword

  Why We Talk About It

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lauren Leto

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  LET ME BE PLAIN when I state that my judgments, wisecracks, and sarcastic comments come from a place of deep admiration for every one of the authors whose work I discuss in these pages. There is nothing more beautiful than a well-written book, and there is nothing more admirable than the attempt to create something beautiful.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Justice League of Ex-Teachers of Mine

  THE FIRST BOOK I ever loved was a book about a monster in a child’s closet. I had a hard time learning how to read when I was in first grade. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the fields of letters, the spaces, the punctuation. I have a clear memory, however, of being brought into the hallway one day by my teacher. She opened a book and walked me through, slowly, how to string everything together and follow, sentence by sentence, a cohesive story. And it was a garish story. The kind of story that children’s book authors seem pathologically drawn to: a kid is utterly terrified by a monster, who, inexplicably—when the kid finally tries to talk to the monster—turns out to be friendly. Easy enough, I thought, and continued on rereading that same book every day for the rest of first grade.

  In second grade, lightning struck when my teacher told me I was good at reading. If you tell an eight-year-old she has a talent for something, she’ll never give it a rest; you tell her, “Oh, you’re funny!” and the child will keep making raspberries and pretending to be a monkey until you want to rip her arms out. You say, “Wow! You’re pretty good at basketball,” and it will end in tears as you finally pull him by his hair off the court. Tell her, “Hey! You’re a great singer!” and you’re in for it—you’ll get a flouncing bundle emitting unbridled music-like monstrosities whom you’ll have to stab in the heart before it’ll be quiet ever again.

  My astute parents had up to this point avoided telling me I was good at anything. Our nightly dinners were spent reinforcing the message “It’s not funny” to my brother, for good measure repeatedly reminding my sister she should “stop drawing everywhere,” and me, my directive was to “stop imagining things.” But Mr. Booker, that unsympathetic man, complimented me one day on my reading skills. It was all downhill from there. When my parents figured out what the teacher had done, they marched into the principal’s office to complain. “She does nothing but read!” “She has no friends!” “Her nose is always in a book!” Meeting only silence and bewilderment there, they picketed the PTO: “It can’t be healthy! Reading all the time!” “What if she needs glasses someday?! Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses!”

  Unfortunately for them, I had been told I was good at reading and I was not going to stop. I read in my closet with all the lights off and nothing but a flashlight, finally coming out only after my mom had, in an abrupt state of panic, called the police. I read in the bathtub. In the process I used up all the hot water because a leaky drain necessitated that the water be left running for the tub to stay full. My brother and sister took years of ice-cold showers because I couldn’t put down anything from Animorphs to Nabokov (I still do this—they’ve asked me to stop coming home for the holidays). “Go outside and make some friends,” my mom would say with a sigh. I’d try to please her by Rollerblading in a circle in our driveway while reading. Unsurprisingly I didn’t make many friends that way. I refused to ride my bike to school because there was no way to read while biking. Instead I’d walk in an ambling fashion with my face in a book, resulting not once but twice in my somehow arriving home with only one shoe on. “This needs to stop! You have a problem!” my father cried. He sent me to summer camps to straighten me out but I’d hide contraband in my suitcase and spend the week away from home in Narnia.

  Teachers in subsequent grades would complain to Mr. Booker, that innocent man, “If you had just kept your mouth shut she’d be listening in class instead of hiding her face behind a book!” They quickly banded together, the Justice League of Ex-Teachers of Mine, in order to throw a side-eye at anyone who dared encourage children, lest they turn out like me. They met every Monday morning, to start the week off right, in the teacher’s lounge. The password to get in was “mediocre”—a key element of their mission statement: “Keep them mediocre, keep our jobs easy.” They’d sit and stew in there. “I’ve run out of stickers to put on her reading chart. This child is a drain on the system; my sticker budget has run dry!” They’d join my parents at the PTO picket. sticker hog! their signs cried out.

  By the time I was in high school, the attendance list had grown so large they had to move the meetings to the gym. “Hi, I’m Ms. Washington and I was Lauren’s teacher in tenth grade. One time, I had to send her home because she was crying about losing her annotated copy of Catch-22. Children shouldn’t have to miss class because they’re sad about a book. It’s disgusting and subversive.” “Hi, I’m Mr. Young and I was Lauren’s teacher in ninth grade. Once, she turned in what was supposed to be a book report but instead amounted to a terrifyingly detailed account of J. D. Salinger’s life. I am sincerely worried she might be stalking him.” “I’m Mr. Montague and I was Lauren’s twelfth-grade teacher. I was unable to get her to stop laughing when Lear’s Earl of Gloucester dives off the cliff. It confused the other students and I had to give her detention.”

  Upon graduation, no one was sad to see me go: “She’s somebody else’s problem now!” “I bet she doesn’t finish college, she’ll be too busy reading.” “You can’t while away all your time reading in college!”

  PART I

  For the Love of Print

  Commercial Confessions

  I’M AN ANXIOUS PERSON. My guess (gathered from an unscientific survey of fellow readers and the uneducated opinions of my family) is that this may be the result of years of overexposure to fictional worlds and underexposure
to real-world activities such as recess, school dances, and cocktail parties. I’m not very comfortable in settings and situations most people take for granted as part of the comings and goings of everyday life. For example, traveling: traveling with me is an experience I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone—and I go to great lengths to save friends and family the trouble. Accompanying me on planes and in cars is nightmarish. If it weren’t for the helpful tricks that I’ve come to rely on, I don’t know how I’d get anywhere. I’ve developed ways to deal with my anxiety, tics that keep the pressure down and keep the terror at bay. These quirks are my dirty little secrets. Sometimes it’s just two stiff drinks at the airport TGIF before boarding; other times the situation calls for more drastic actions to divert my attention from my mounting anxiety over the prospect of hurtling forward on a road or through the sky. I need something a little more potent.

  I’m telling you this because I want to be as honest as possible with you. Janet Evanovich books are my booze; I can’t board a plane without checking the airport bookstore to find the newest tale of Stephanie Plum. If I’ve read all the available Evanovich, I have to pick the next-easiest, sleaziest thing. I started and finished Twilight on red-eye trips from Detroit to Los Angeles and back; I conquered New Moon before touchdown from New York to San Francisco. I wept over Idaho while reading the first Hunger Games. At these moments I need my reading easy and quick; I need to turn the pages without knowing it. I don’t have the bandwidth to wonder about the underlying meaning of the exact word chosen to phrase how one turned around or analyze just why an object was described in a certain way. I need distraction, not deep thoughts.

  I make this distinction because most of this book is about avoiding bad books, and I don’t want a reader to think I’m being an elitist snob. Considering yourself a serious reader doesn’t mean you can’t read light books. Loving to read means you sometimes like to turn your head off. Reading is not about being able to recite passages from Camus by memory. Loving young adult novels well past adolescence isn’t a sign of stunted maturity or intelligence. The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your shelf. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm.

  Let’s all embrace the fact that The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all of Saul Bellow’s works combined. Dan Brown and his ilk are keeping our bookstores in semi-business. If America chooses easy escapism over dense dialogue, we should welcome that decision with equanimity. When it comes to reading, whatever floats the boat. And if someone deems your reading choice frivolous, who cares? If it’s what you want to read, go for it.

  However, silly books shouldn’t be all we read. We have to acknowledge that there is a problem with an exclusive diet of the latest hot commercial fiction and nonfiction: after a while, you realize, the books blend together. The voices, the stories, the characters, the arcs of the drama—after a while, it can all start to feel so…familiar. If we get too comfortable in our reading choices—too lazy—we’re giving something up. Kids get turned off of reading before they even begin in earnest because they recognize the predictability of it all. Die-hard readers who stick to Nicholas Sparks must have missed a few steps on the road through adolescence. How does one waste significant time reading and never open a book by Philip Roth? Before a middle schooler reads another “boy meets girl” young adult novel, we should hand them a copy of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson or sit them down with a Brontë sister. Small steps to open up their perspective on plots a bit.

  Nabokov described great stories as “supreme fairy tales”—they take our imagination to work, igniting dreams we wouldn’t know how to express in our daily lives. The best books expand and challenge the mind. The “easy” books don’t give us folds and symbols to look beneath or around; they don’t have images that come to you suddenly when you’re alone on a street corner and a passing man’s face suddenly strikes you, like the line in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, as “rumpled like an unmade bed.” They don’t have perfectly captured vignettes that live on for you beyond the book and enter your life; like the line from Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help that comes to you as you accept a third date with someone you really could see yourself with, just like the last guy: “You love once, I told you. Even when you love over and over again it is the same once, the same one.”

  I am not a scholar of literature. All my commentary comes from my experiences and presumptions as a reader. As you read what follows—my one-sentence book reviews, my gross generalizations about others’ bookshelves, my categorical statements on how to fake any author, my love lavished on little-known treasures in literature, my cheat sheets on how to write like any author, my horror stories from my life as a bookworm, and my open letters to authors’ fans—feel free to be annoyed if I snark on an author you love. Feel free to berate my schooling—my college degree is in political theory and constitutional democracy, a pretentious way of explaining that at one point in time I read a lot of Dostoyevsky and Plato. I’m a law school dropout and I managed to fail my college precalculus math class three semesters in a row. I’m afraid to get on planes. I am not an authority. I’m a Janet Evanovich fan, for Christ’s sake.

  The Bookshelf of the Vanities

  WHO AM I TO comment on bookshelf displays? My family home has a bookshelf filled with…pottery. But it wasn’t always like that. I grew up in a home with the most beautiful bookshelf you’ve ever seen. My father spent weeks constructing a built-in bookshelf that spanned the entirety of a long wall in our living room, save a center spot for the television. The bookshelf was painted a bright white and had intricate molding, contrasting with the raspberry-colored walls and deep-green carpeting of our living room. For the better part of a decade, I turned to those shelves to find my mom’s extensive collection of Kitty Kelley biographies, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Ken Follett books, past yearbooks, and Stephen King novels.

  A few years ago my mother decided the bookshelf was no longer for holding a book collection. Instead, it would be for her burgeoning pottery collection. I visited my family’s home over the holidays to find, instead of rows of books, a neatly arrayed series of bright greenish-blue ceramic pottery lining the living room wall. Plates, candlesticks, vases, all in various shades of aquamarine, which my mother swore up and down matched with her green carpet and raspberry wallpaper in some way my untrained eyes couldn’t perceive.

  Where were the books? She had relocated them to a low cabinet at the end of the room, near our kitchen. The cabinet had a broken latch, so the door swung open violently no matter how steadily and slowly you tried to crack it. Instead of being neatly lined up, the books were placed in plastic bins according to no method that I could discern. Harry Potter found himself in the same crate as Norman Mailer, my father’s guide to self-employment next to my brother’s Calvin and Hobbes. Tears sprung to my eyes as I saw Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination piled underneath numbers five and nine of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. The bins could hardly fit in the cabinet, so every time I opened the doors, they would lurch forward at me. I’d use one hand to push the bins of books back, a knee to hold the cabinet door steady, and my free hand to root through and find what I wanted.

  I felt I had to set the books free. I had to rescue them from my mother’s shuttered hiding place. So I mailed the ones I wanted to protect to myself in New York City. With no doorman at my fifth-floor walk-up apartment to receive packages, I would have to go to the post office, pick up one box at a time (there were four in total), and walk the fifteen blocks home with—by that time—arms that felt like they were slowly catching fire. Then I’d head up the five flights and unpack the books onto the small coffee table that I fashioned into a type of bookshelf by lining up rows between the legs and across the top. My next apartment was also on the fifth floor. I had a friend help me with the boxes this time, our arms burning for days afterward. There, I lined the assorted paperbacks and hardcovers across a pair of drawers, stacking one row on top of t
he other to fit them all. In a third apartment, I bought two cheap ladders from a hardware store and stacked books across their rungs, the ladders leaning against the wall. It was improvisation. I didn’t have the money to invest in a choice piece of furniture but displaying my books felt like an important step of moving in. Ask anyone with a big book collection, and they’ll tell you moving them was the hardest part of the move. Take down a bookshelf and there’s often no less than four, possibly up to eight, good Lord if it’s over ten, boxes of dense material. This is the single greatest argument for welcoming e-books. Abandoning print and having your Kindle on display instead doesn’t sound like such a bad idea while carrying book box number seven to the car.

  For some reason, even people who don’t read own bookshelves or a sort of showcase for their books. They seem to be a necessary component of “the home,” an adornment no self-respecting adult can live without. But what, when you really look at them closely, do these simple pieces of furniture tell you when they’re filled with their owner’s library—books received as gifts, bought in an airport on the outgoing leg of a vacation, or idly picked up while in line at a store? You are in someone’s home. Somewhere—likely right in front of you—is a wealth of information about who your host is, or who they want you to think they are. Let’s review a few of the typical bookshelf presentations you may encounter and the personalities behind them.