Have you read…?
In book events and online, I often get the question, “Have you read X’s book Y?” I don’t know about other authors, but I’m not embarrassed to say, “No, I haven’t.”
I know where readers are coming from when they ask such a question. They either follow X or really liked Y, and that “or” isn’t necessarily exclusive. I could be dishonest or say something like “I’ll have to look out for X’s books.” That would make the person who’s asking feel better and maybe validate her or his reading choices, but I’m an honest person. I’m not going to say I’ve read a book if I haven’t, for several reasons that go beyond honesty:
First, there are so many books and good authors now. I don’t have time to read them all. Maybe if I were on a long-haul starship like Brian Aldiss’s (have you read that novel?), I might get through all the books in the ship’s database, assuming I wasn’t sleeping away in a cryopod. Here on Earth, I just don’t have time to read them all. For fiction, I’m a speed-reader, which is why I often peruse a fiction story a second time before I review it, looking for writing details I might have missed (as a speed-reader who’s also an author, I tend to autocorrect as I read, sailing through the editing errors). For non-fiction, I read more slowly, searching for the little details I want to file away in that hard drive in my head. (I do this for fiction too, but not as much, yet certainly more for historical fiction where I always wonder where reality ends and the fiction begins).
Second, although I’m an avid reader, I might not like X and I might hate Y. To avoid mentioning current authors who piss me off, let me mention X = Eliot and Y = Silas Marner—terrible author and terrible book. In fact, I’m not much into classics. The only Dickens stories I like are Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. The last classic I read was Les Miserables (I read it in the original French in high school). The best thing I can say about that boring novel is that it’s better than the musical that has not one memorable tune. Because no one can read every book, reading choices are subjective. The person who asks me about X and Y made one choice, but my reading list might have zero intersection with that person’s list. And my choices aren’t based on popularity or critical acclaim. I think the last book on the NY Times bestseller list I read was Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci. (I used the Renaissance milieu depicted there in my upcoming novel Son of Thunder, but I also read the book just for fun and my general education.)
Third, consider the case where the person asking the title question is reading the blurb on the back of one of my own books and precedes that question with “This seems a lot like Y.” I never show it, but I resent such a question. If any of my books is exactly like Y, it’s plagiarism. Every story of mine is different from every other one, and any similarity beyond principal characters and settings (as a series or trilogy often dictates) can only reduce to genre. You can observe this even in my titles—there’s no Gone something, The Girl with something, or Fifty Shades of anything. Yes, I make sure my titles are original, even though they can’t be copyrighted. You might not like them (I’ll admit Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! is a mouthful), but they’re all mine. (That doesn’t mean they don’t coincide with someone else’s—independent inventions are as much a part of writing as they are in technology.)
Authors should be readers, but they can’t read everything. The reading public should show us a bit of sympathy, especially because we’re all busy writing more stories for them. I’d certainly read more if I weren’t doing that.
I usually take the question in a positive sense, though: The person asking it is offering evidence that s/he’s a reader! Good! That’s the most important takeaway. Storytelling is quintessentially human; today reading adds to our humanity. Anyone who participates in that great adventure is to be commended.
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Comments are always welcome.
The Last Humans. “’What happened to the first interim president?’ ‘She died from rabies. A feral dog bit her daughter. The daughter bit her. Teenagers, you know.’” Penny Castro is on a forensic dive for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department when she surfaces to find a post-apocalyptic world. Follow her adventures in this thriller from Black Opal Books. Available in print and ebook format from Amazon or the publisher, or in ebook format from Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). Also available at your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
