Judging a Book By Its Lover

by Lauren Leto

  A Gift Guide by a Bad Gift-Giver

  IN NINTH GRADE I was invited to the surprise birthday of a popular guy at my school. I’m fairly sure it was by accident, that his mother picked the wrong Lauren to call from the school’s phone book. I hadn’t realized it was passé to bring presents to a high schooler’s birthday party and it seemed inconceivable that anything other than a book should be given. Of course, I knew just the book. I had finished reading On the Road a couple months earlier and thought the combination of a lurid plot and simple diction would be wonderful for a sixteen-year-old boy. The fact that I mentally described the book as “wonderful” should have tipped me off that it wasn’t the most ideal present. But I naïvely spent my allowance at the local bookstore and brought the wrapped book to his party.

  His mother, who had called to invite me, didn’t recognize me at the door. When I explained who I was, her disappointment showed in the way her eyes widened and her face contorted in a grimace-like smile. That was hint enough for me, so I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said as I stepped into her house. She just nodded as I passed, us both ignoring my awkward fate of being an unintended attendee. I’ll spare you details of the dependent relationship I developed with a corner of his house that provided adequate shade from the kids who didn’t care to talk to me. It’s enough to say the boy was a nice person, more gracious than his friends, who snickered as he opened the present, one of the only presents brought to the party.

  “Did you like the book?” I’d ask him in school days later. He told me he hadn’t gotten to it yet but he’d read the back cover and it sounded great. That’s exactly what he said, “It sounds great.” Telling someone a book sounds “great” is the equivalent of noting the weather in an elevator. It’s what one does to be polite. But I was optimistic; He likes the book, I thought.

  “Did you like the book?” I’d ask weeks later, catching him at his locker in an empty hallway. I could feel my eyes wide, trained on him. He told me he had just been about to start it the other night. He thought he was going to start sometime that week. I was dumbly elated, not the first fool who believed a beautiful boy.

  “How’s the book?” I asked again some more weeks later. He responded he hadn’t started it yet. At that point I realized he probably wasn’t going to read it. It made me sad to think of the gift, wherever it was. Sitting alone on his dresser, probably to be handed off to some other member of his family. I pictured the mother who didn’t know who I was reading it, enjoying an experience that wasn’t hers to enjoy.

  You would’ve thought I’d learn after that. Books aren’t good gifts for people who don’t read. But like a maniac, I keep shoving books into nonreader hands. I picture myself as not unlike John the Baptist. But instead of preaching for Jesus, I’m preaching for stories! Throwing fiction into the faces of nonbelievers, hoping to ignite a fire in their belly. I’m a selfish book-giver, choosing books with the expectation they’ll mean something for our relationship, will tie us together. I’m giving you a journey. Appreciate it. Talk about it with me later.

  That’s the best part of having a book in common with friends: talking about it. And I find with all the books I’ve littered among friends throughout the years, I never know exactly when that book will catch up with us, but whether it takes weeks or years, it tends to be a great moment. I don’t shoot 100 percent. I’m still only at about 40 percent for gifted or lent books being read. People don’t have enough free time. They haven’t had a chance yet. They have a lot of other things to read. They forgot to take it on vacation and who knows when they’ll have time again. And I keep lending and giving out books, hoping to improve my batting average by hedging my bets. I’m still waiting to hear back from most of my chosen recipients. But I soldier on.

  I gave a genuine guy friend On the Road as well. He was as gracious as the boy from the party and even texted me five years later in the middle of the night to say he had just cracked open the book and it actually was as good as I had said. I have no idea how he even got my phone number.

  I’ve bought too many past boyfriends the book Sophie’s World. I tell them about how it got me into philosophy and is the reason why I majored in political theory. I stupidly expect them to understand me better after reading it. So far only one man has finished it, after we broke up. There are reasons I’m single; this might be one of them. I bought Lionel Shriver’s Game Control for a man I thought wanted to change the world after a couple great, inspiring dates. We broke up before he cracked the spine. Super Sad True Love Story went out to a technologist who managed to create the same event as the title in my life without ever reading the book (or returning it). I fell in love with a man who enjoyed Middlesex as much as I did. Along with another who articulated the same reasons I felt A Farewell to Arms was overrated. And a third who borrowed Choke and gave it back with sarcastic annotations.

  I lent out a copy of The Bad Girl to a guy who made me laugh. I lent Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery to a coworker who hasn’t mentioned it since. My copy of Rules of Civility has gone out to two friends who couldn’t stop mentioning it, although one of them hasn’t given it back yet. I got in a fight with one of my closest friends after I lent her The Sound and the Fury, and she returned to me a different edition of the book, having lost mine. My upstairs neighbors received Richard Yates by Tao Lin and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I, possibly drunkenly, threw Family Circle by Susan Braudy at them too. Who knows, I can’t find it. After too much wine or beer at my house I’ve run to my bookshelf and thrown everything from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser at people. Parties at my place mean you’re more likely to leave with books in hand than drugs. Sometimes the books return, sometimes they’re out of sight forever.

  I present this all as a cautionary tale to my following gift suggestions. They might be a bit off pitch and you may not ever hear from the recipients about the books again, but if you do nail it, I expect a commission.

  Gift Guide

  OBNOXIOUS MOTHER-IN-LAW

  The Puppy Diaries by Jill Abramson. Frilly but with an author and contributors who pack enough notable punch that she won’t feel her intelligence is being insulted.

  INDIFFERENT FATHER-IN-LAW

  Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. No fuss, no sentiment, no problem.

  MOTHER WHO WON’T ADMIT TO READING

  A political biography, but avoid the latest presidential biography; she has too many opinions on him. Veer toward the more nostalgia-inducing figures, anyone from the seventies except Henry Kissinger.

  FATHER WHO DOESN’T READ

  Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives: An All-American Road Trip…with Recipes! All fathers who don’t read like Guy Fieri.

  SLATTERNLY SISTER

  After the intensity of The Virgin Suicides, I tend to think of Jeffrey Eugenides as the patron saint of lost causes. Not for his ability to remedy futility, but for his ability to capture it. Present it and hope your sister learns something from the Lisbon girls.

  BROTHER WHOSE FAVORITE BOOK IS ANY HARRY POTTER

  Are you trying to better him? Try The Princess Bride. If you’re just trying to please him, go for The Hunger Games. Do you hate your brother? Gift Twilight to his e-reader; the discretion and accessibility guarantee he’ll secretly read it, kind of like it, and feel shame because of it.

  KIND OF STILL SLUTTY BEST FRIEND FROM THE SORORITY

  Why Men Love Bitches.

  BOYFRIEND WHO MAY VERY SOON BE AN EX-BOYFRIEND, BUT IT’S THE HOLIDAYS, HEY

  Give him something you want to read and if he doesn’t immediately take to it, ask if you can borrow it to read, very quickly, and say you’ll give it right back.

  BOYFRIEND WHO ISN’T AWFUL

  The Portable Dorothy Parker, because he’s not awful and there aren’t that many men around who are so great they’ll read Dorothy Parker and laugh about it with you. If he seems uninterested in the female satirist, he
is awful.

  HUSBAND OR WIFE

  I don’t know—you married them. Do you have to get them presents anymore?

  GIRLFRIEND-LIKE FIGURE IN YOUR LIFE

  Test her! Throw her to the wolves. Give her some good Russian literature and pat her on the bottom as you send her out the door. If she returns having read it, maybe you keep her.

  REAL GIRLFRIEND

  Show her you love her! Set her up nice with a full collection of something wicked, like Oscar Wilde.

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

  FOR THOSE TIMES WHEN you’re looking to cut someone down to size, the following approaches will shut the yapping maw of any pompous beast dropping names of the literary works and artists they seem to feel so intimately acquainted with. Here’s a secret about readers: we don’t need to fawn over our favorite book. Hit the right button and you’ll get oozing fandom, sure—but we have nothing to prove. The couple at the dinner party who raise their voices debating whether or not Nick Carraway is attracted to Gatsby? They don’t know what they’re talking about. Beat them at their own game by regurgitating one of these lines in a wry, disenchanted tone of voice.

  “I don’t dispute To Kill a Mockingbird’s place in American literature as the middle-school conduit from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to the more complex world of social novels; it’s just that if she were really talented, Harper Lee would have felt compelled to write another book. I don’t believe Mockingbird is good enough to be both a debut novel and a magnum opus.”—To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

  “People too often focus on the mythic quality of the story when the real beauty of the book is in the characters. Readers get hung up by the way the story line is represented in today’s popular media. It’s not about a whale.”—Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

  “It’s not that In Search of Lost Time didn’t hold my attention, but I kept getting distracted by all the details that I knew were biographically in line with Proust’s life and wondering how many of the ‘fictional’ details actually were drawn from his life, just undiscovered by biographers. I spent more time Googling his acquaintances than reading the book. Knowing that a work is heavily based off an author’s life makes me distracted by the possibilities of which details are drawn from real life.”—In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

  “Sure, Nineteen Eighty-four was good when I was in high school and felt like the bells between classes and announcements over the PA system controlled my life; however, one cannot doubt that Orwell oversensationalized the individual’s loss of control in society. Now, Orwell cannot stand up to Huxley since the rise of the Internet. Huxley won the battle for the future with his society of inescapable individualism. Although Brave New World contained too many overt metaphors—and the repetitive nonsense with the ‘ford’ joke was irritating. His satire could benefit from a little more subtlety.”—1984, George Orwell

  “Whenever I hear someone lavishing praise on The Great Gatsby I assume they have subconscious desires to live a life like Gatsby. Oh, I don’t think that about you, though.”—The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Really? You enjoyed American Psycho? I never got around to reading it; I usually don’t share the same interest in books with my brother, who has it on his bookshelf next to his limited-edition Scarface DVD.”—American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

  “George Eliot captures the dynamics of nineteenth-century politics, to be sure. However, I can’t stand her exasperating commentary on every action of the characters. Do I really need to read pages on the lingering silences in Dorothea’s interactions with her husband? She’d be right to apply some of Hemingway’s iceberg theory and let the reader uncover her intentions for themselves.”—Middlemarch, George Eliot

  “I cannot get past the sense that the stories would have fared better if they were presented as self-contained pieces in a collection, rather than being forced to cohere as a novel. As in Byatt’s earlier novel, Possession, the structure doesn’t feel organic. I have to assume she thinks she’s using some sort of thematic tool, but the result is just long-winded and rambling.”—The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt

  “The superficiality of the characters makes it hard to stay invested in their fates, and I cared less and less about their philosophical inclinations as the conversations became more and more contrived.”—Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

  “The Duel perfectly captured gossip bred from the monotony of small-town characters. It falls flat, however, when Chekhov takes moral positions and veers into righteous Tolstoyan hyperbole.”—The Duel, Anton Chekhov

  “I wasn’t confused by the overabundance of pronouns, I was just uninterested in watching Mantel flex her historical knowledge through arbitrary references instead of trying to create a real story or venturing substantive commentary.”—Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

  “Seven hundred pages of plotless onanism and stylistic indulgence.”—Ulysses, James Joyce

  The Written Word

  THERE’S A REASON BOOK lovers are the last ones to hold out in this digital revolution. Music and movie lovers have never had the same pleasure that book lovers have in being able to identify on sight a fellow fan of Tolstoy or Didion. What does the e-reader revolution mean for all of us who get a thrill from noting the book in a stranger’s hands?

  Music devotees meet other fans at concerts or by recognizing concert T-shirts. Movie lovers will wait in line together at midnight for the first peek at the new Tarantino film. Readers, however, have it better; they carry around the objects of their worship and roots of their collective bond everywhere they go. I saw a girl reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy on the subway the other day. Her mouth was pressed tight as if she were trying to prevent herself from laughing in public. It made me think of when I read Palahniuk’s Choke in ninth grade and learned things about sex that I had no idea humans could do and how I had to tell my friends about every disgusting scene in the book. Or how his book Survivor, about a doomed plane ride, haunts me whenever I board an airplane. That’s the kind of connection we can form with a stranger—even without their knowing—just by seeing a particular book in their hands. Life happens alongside the act of reading—a story is forever mixed with where we were and what we were doing while we were reading that book. To see someone else reading that book is to know that you share a sort of intimate experience. Ten years from now the girl from the subway will be in a restaurant and find herself next to a man reading Palahniuk, and she’ll be transported back to her first job, her commutes home, and the memory of trying her hardest not to laugh out loud while reading the clipped absurdism of Pygmy on the train.

  Except in ten years, print books themselves may be a thing of the past. I fear as digital books become ubiquitous, the tradition of reading may remain as strong but the ability to sight fellow minds will be disintegrated. As book covers slip from hands and are replaced by plastic tablets, readers lose the wonderful, clandestine opportunity to quickly create a mutual understanding with strangers. Then what will we be left with? And what about other print traditions? If bookstores vanish, where will an author’s book readings occur? And book signings? What will authors sign?

  I might be biased. One of my most cherished possessions is a book signed by Jeffrey Eugenides, dedicated “To Lauren: the note margin girl,” because I had marked up his The Virgin Suicides with notes in a fervor to discover why the virgins killed themselves, like it was a mystery to be solved. My bookshelf is neatly organized by genre. I’ve been known to go back and buy the tangible version of a book I’ve read on my iPad just to have it on my shelf.

  Any reader will tell you fondly that it’s nice to be able to fit six books into their iPad instead of trying to cram them into a suitcase when they go on vacation. It’s nice to buy another book by the author you just finished reading at midnight on a Friday. It’s wonderful to be able to flip the e-pages with one hand, so the other can stay snug under your pillow while you drift to sleep. And certainly it’s a nice pl
us that e-books are cheaper than print editions (but not cheaper enough; surely we can do a little better than one dollar or two off an electronic version of a book). The ease of having all those letters and pages in one slim tablet isn’t anything to disregard as well. I would have loved to read A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe on the iPad instead of lugging that thing around.

  But how can I scribble in the margins? E-readers have been trying to tackle this with several programs to help users annotate, but they seem too purposeful, too controlled, too able to be indexed. The joy in note taking is the ability to scribble wherever without explicitly committing to drawing some form of conclusion or highlighting a point. I want to mark up a book and forget about it. I want to never see that note again until I’m trying to remember the name of that one character’s daughter and I open the book and there’s that phrase that so concisely summed up where I thought my life was at the time I was reading the book.

  Back to my most lamentable point: we’re losing the ability to recognize fellow readers. You can bring your Kindle into a coffee shop, but unless I position myself right behind you, I have no idea what you’re reading. Will we wear T-shirts to ensure we can identify one another? Will I have Franzen poised at a desk emblazoned on my chest the same way a teenager dons Lady Gaga in front of a mic? Will we place promotional stickers of books on the outside of Kindles so everyone passing by knows what that tablet contains? How sad this future seems, with no latest bestseller in the hand of the person next to you on a plane for you to strike up conversation about. You’ll have to wait to meet fellow fans until the author comes to town.