What I Want in a Book

I love books. You love books, don't you? Of course you do. I doubt anybody who doesn't love books reads this blog.

Today I found myself thinking-- not for the first time-- about what I want in a book.

I'm not really talking about the content of a book here. I'm not talking about what makes a book a great book, or even a good book. I'm talking about what I want from any book.

This thought came to me in the context of first lines and last lines.

Basically, I want a first line to come with a flourish, and I want the same with the last line. It might be a strange quirk but nothing irritates me more, in the context of books, than a purely functional opening sentence and final sentence. It's the literary equivalent of a curt nod. Or even the lack of a curt nod.

I don't care what sort of book it is. In fact, the more mundane or trivial the subject, the more I want the book to open and close with a flourish. I want a book to take itself seriously, especially if this takes some chutzpah.

So even if it's a parish history, or a get-fit manual, or a guide to pub games...I want it to play up its subject a little bit, or preferably a lot. I want it to welcome me, and to leave a ringing goodbye in my ears. (My all-time favourite example of this is the last lines of the introduction to The Year in Music 1978 by Judith Glassman: "It is music and, in 1978, as always, it was ineffable and inexplicable, mere vibrations in the air with a power to cheer or sadden, to gladden and amaze, to move, so soothe, to awaken. It was the expression of an ancient art wrapped in layers of myth, echoes of Prometheus who shares his fire anew on each fresh, darkened stage. It was glorious and inexhaustible." That's the sort of showmanship I want from authors!)

What really bothers me are books that are really just files between two covers, repositories of information. I hate that.

And this preference, really, determines all my wants in a book.

I want a book to make an effort. I want some hype, some pizazz.

So a book without an introduction seems to me like a house without a welcome mat. But what I really like is an introduction, a preface, and a foreword.

And, while we're at it, I'd also like an afterword, a postcript, an epigraph, a dedication, an acknowledgements page, and so on. "A note on the type" is especially nice, since it's so utterly gratuitous. Whoever looked for one of those?

Oh, and there should certainly be a publisher's logo. I have a lot to say about publisher's logos, but it might be too much of a digression. (One of my colleagues wrote an excellent two-part post on this subject, here and here.)

There's some things I could live without. I don't like it when a novel has the opening section of the author's next novel at the end. I never read those. Maybe because they seem too crassly commercial, or because I don't want to get invested in a story I might not finish. Similarly, any advertising material is dispensable, such as ads for other books by the publishing house.

An index is useful in a non-fiction book, but it doesn't bother me when it's not there. I don't care about bibliographies or "further reading" lists.

Also (for whatever reason), my wants in a book apply to its written contents only. I've never cared about gilt edges, bookmark ribbons, colour plates, or any of that sort of thing. And I get irritated and impatient when other people coo over them. (Having said that, there should be a bit of this in a Bible, even a cheap Bible. And also in a Collected Poems-- although it hurts me these days to even mention poetry.)

There's something magical about a book. Any book.

In the same way every human being seems to me like a reiteration of the mystery of humanity, every book seems like a reiteration of the mystery of the world itself. And by "the world", I mean the whole cosmos and everything imaginable. (Then why didn't I just say that? Because I think "the world" actually expresses more than "the cosmos", that's why. The world is bigger than the cosmos.)

Just writing a book about something confers dignity and status upon that thing. In my mind, at least. The fact that a text has a title and a cover (even a virtual cover) elevates it to a subject in its own right. Imagine, for instance, a book called The Hanging Signs of Hudderfield. Not a novel with a quirky title (I hate those), but a book literally devoted to that subject. In a way (as I see it), such a book would bring something new into the world. The hanging signs of Huddersfield already existed; now they have become the subject of a book.

This might seem like a throwaway sort of claim, somewhat smart-alecky and idle. But I actually mean it with all my heart and it's one of the ideas that brings me most pleasure in the world. The joy I take from scanning a book of shelves and seeing that someone has written a whole book on this or that subject (which one might not have expected them to) is immense, bottomless.

Within the confines of that book, the author and the reader are primarily concerned with only one thing. If you are reading The Hanging Signs of Huddersfield, everything else recedes into the background. World War Two is important. Dinosaurs are important. Laurel and Hardy are important. But within the covers of the book, nothing gets top billing over the hanging signs of Huddersfield. There is something here that penetrates to the very essence of life and reality; the magical fact that every place and every moment and every soul has its own irreducible importance.

(A question for my readers: do you care about pictures in a blog post? I try to put them in because they break up the text, but it can be a pain sometimes. If they are helpful, though, I am happy to continue with them.)