How Not to Recommend a Book
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A few years ago, I wrote in The Atlantic about my complete failure to run a book club. This group should have been a slam dunk: I’d recruited my best friends; we were all stuck inside because of COVID, yearning for distraction and connection; we were all women who love to read and talk about books. And yet we managed to get through only two selections, both of which I hated, before giving up entirely.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- Americans should stop using the term Christian nationalism
- Atlanta’s Edith Wharton
- What atheism could not explain
- “Fortunes,” a short story by Mieko Kawakami
- “Misrule Music,” a poem by Robert Pinsky
Why was reading with my friends so hard? The librarians, professors, and booksellers I talked with gave me some clues: We hadn’t agreed on a theme, and we probably met too infrequently. But the most memorable insight to come out of my reporting was the concept of “reader’s advisory,” which means a knack for intuiting which volumes specific people would enjoy. The phrase comes from library science, but it describes the kinds of interactions that happen in bookstores and on the internet, too. Another version shows up in The Atlantic’s book-recommendation lists, including Rhian Sasseen’s recent collection of books that demand to be discussed with friends.
The work of reader’s advisory is different when aimed at a hypothetical person (or group of them) instead of a specific friend, customer, or patron. I edited Sasseen’s article, and when we discussed the titles she might write about, we wanted to cast a wide net, while also recognizing because no such grouping will be perfect, being distinct is better than being boring. This is how you come up with a popular nonfiction book about gossip on the same list as Egyptian fiction from a Nobel Prize winner. Then we had to consider the purpose of the list—which in this case involves books specifically meant to be talked about. Lots of great works aren’t made for reading alongside a friend, Sasseen argues. “To properly commune over literature, you need the right book—something that excites you and makes you think,” she writes. I did this myself once, in 2023, compiling a list of books to read with someone you love.
Those were offbeat selections, I admit, and three years later, I might have chosen different titles (though I stand by Samantha Irby) because my sense of reader’s advisory has evolved. So has my understanding of what my friends might like, regardless of my belief in the infallibility of my personal taste. I try to be discerning when I pass books along by word-of-mouth. At a party last month, after I told two acquaintances about my job, they asked about the best thing I’d read recently. I admitted that I’d adored Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn, and the couple duly noted the title on Goodreads, but I had to give myself a reality check: This surreal and outrageous portrait of a dying, transphobic New York mother was probably not the right fit for two Northern Virginia 30-somethings who worked in finance. So I told them that if they were looking for something classic that wouldn’t disappoint, I’d just read The Haunting of Hill House, and it was as good as everyone says it is. Come to think of it, Shirley Jackson’s classic novel would be an amazing pick for a book club.
Six Books That Simply Must Be Talked About
By Rhian Sasseen
These six books demand discussion—with a pal, a date, or a book club.
What to Read
Quietly Hostile, by Samantha Irby
No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes. (Straightforward lines like “Yes, I pissed my pants at the club” abound.) The discomfiting yet universal phenomena of aging, being ill, and having your body let you down are Irby’s most reliable subjects, and anaphylaxis, perimenopause, and diarrhea all get their moments in Quietly Hostile, her fourth essay collection. But the book is also a receptacle for her wildest dreams, such as what she would say to Dave Matthews if she could meet him backstage, or a self-indulgent meditation on how she would rewrite original Sex and the City episodes (fueled by her time as a writer on its reboot, And Just Like That). When she wants to, Irby can evoke grief without blinking: She recounts, for example, her final, painful, conversation with her mother. But her writing about the great transition from being “young and lubricated” to middle-aged is reliably moving in its own way, and consistently hilarious. — Emma Sarappo
From our list: The 2023 Summer Reading Guide
Out Next Week
???? I Am Agatha, by Nancy Foley
???? In the Shadow of the Great House, by Daniel Rood
???? Under Water, by Tara Menon
Your Weekend Read
Raymond Chandler and the Case of the Split Infinitive
By Jake Lundberg
In the course of drafting his story, Chandler was no less annoyed by Hollywood than by a new unlikely foe: an Atlantic copy editor, who’d shown the temerity to fix a split infinitive in his text. Chandler instructed Weeks to kindly relay to the “purist who reads your proofs” that “I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”
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