CHAPTER FIVE

Prepare to Be Astonished

A while back, a friend whose unpredictable behavior I usually hold in high esteem handed me a book entitled Father John: Navajo Healer. By the looks of things, he expected me to read it, even though I am not really a Navajo healer autobiography kind of guy. Flummoxed but civil, I took the book home and positioned it on a shelf in a dark, virtually inaccessible corner of my office, right alongside all the other books that friends have forced upon me over the years.

This collection includes Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association, The Frontier World of Doc Holliday, and both Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality and Allen’s somewhat less Jesuitical Hi-Ho, Steverino! My Adventures in the Wonderful Wacky World of Television. If I live to be a thousand years old, I am not going to read any of these books. Especially the one about the American Basketball Association. I have not always been successful at conveying this fact to other people, but I am deadly serious about the way I parcel out my reading time. I may have time for this, but I do not have time for that. Several years ago, I calculated how many books I could read if I lived to my actuarially expected age. The answer was 2,138. In theory, those 2,138 books would include everything from Tristram Shandy to Le Colonel Chabert, with titles by authors as celebrated as Goethe and as obscure as Juan Filloy. In principle, there would be enough time to read 500 masterpieces, 500 minor classics, 500 overlooked works of pure genius, 500 oddities, and 168 examples of first-class trash. But by trash, I am referring to material that is so stupid it makes your heart start pounding and your teeth start chattering. Nowhere in this utopian future would there be time for Hi-Ho, Steverino! Unadulterated stupidity, in the hands of true professionals, can be exhilarating. Lameness is merely lame.

True, I used to be one of those people who could never start a book without finishing it, the compulsive type who could never introduce a volume to his library without making plans to eventually read it. Or to eventually peruse it. Familiarity with this character flaw may have encouraged others to use me as a cultural guinea pig, perversely burdening me with books like Damien the Leper (written by Mia Farrow’s father) or The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, just to see if they were worth taking a stab at. (The second one was; the first one wasn’t.) These forced reconnaissance missions came to an end the day an otherwise likable friend sent me Accordion Man, the self-published autobiography of Electro-Vox legend Dick Contino. Though I revere Mr. Contino for his unparalleled rendition of “Arrivederci, Roma,” and his scintillating solo on “Lady of Spain,” it disturbed me greatly that my friend would have mistaken my affection for Mr. Contino’s music with an interest in his prose. Listening to his compact discs is fine: You can easily read Death in Venice or Pascal’s Pensées while “Roll Out the Barrel” is rumbling along in the background. But if you spend too much time reading how Contino finally came to record “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” you will never get to Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. And Some Prefer Nettles is No. 1,759 on my list.

After I calculated how many books I could polish off between the present moment and my death, I became much more selective in my reading habits. With time’s winged chariot now nipping at my heels, I knew that I needed to pick up the pace, making me less and less likely to read a book just for the sake of reading a book. Life, which in my youth I found unstintingly entertaining, now felt more and more like a Smith & Wesson cocked at my head, so if I had plans to read The Decameron and Finnegans Wake before I checked out for good, I would have to start being a bit more choosy. Logically, this meant that there were great books out there that I already knew I was never going to read. Some, like Arrowsmith and Manhattan Transfer, were books that I was actually looking forward to not reading. The Last of the Mohicans, too. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I have probably seen the last of Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Richard Sheridan, Mikhail Sholokhov, George Sand, Plautus, Terence, Anatole France, François Mauriac, Laura Z. Hobson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. If I live to be eighty, which I do not expect to do, I might set aside a year to read all the books I long ago decided that I would never read. But I suspect that reading Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Hardy all in one year might kill me. It has surely killed others.

I believe that serious, or let us say obsessive, readers all have some sort of clock or meter running in our heads. We have a rough idea of how long we expect to live, and we have structured our reading habits accordingly. Once you reach the age of sixty, as I have, it is debatable whether there is still time left for Pliny the Elder, but there is certainly no time left for Pearl Buck. Any book you read from that time on could be your last. You wouldn’t want it to be The Good Earth. It is said that a few hundred years ago, in the time of Thomas Jefferson, for example, it was possible for a person to read every book that had ever been printed. It is still possible to read every great book that has ever been printed; it would take about three years. Maybe four. Five, if you’re a slow reader. But once you expand that universe to include the near-great, or the not-so-great, or so-so efforts by authors who had written other books that were great, the task becomes much more arduous. Something has to give. I love Men Without Women and In Our Time, but have no great desire to read Across the River and into the Trees. David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations are among my favorites; The Mystery of Edwin Drood I am prepared to take a rain check on. The Good Soldier is a small miracle; I suspect that the lesser works of Ford Madox Ford are not. John Collier, James Hadley Chase, Sax Rohmer, Erle Stanley Gardner? Maybe next lifetime. There is, it must be emphasized, nothing wrong with any of these authors. But I no longer have time to read them.

Reading is intensely personal. This is why I do not like it when people try to force books into my hands. If I wanted to read Philip K. Dick, I would have probably gotten around to it by now. Ditto William Gibson and Ursula K. Le Guin. Book lovers are engaged in the ceaseless reconfiguration of a Platonic reading list that will occupy their free time for the next thirty-five years: First, I’ll get to War and Peace, then Ulysses, then that juggernaut by Proust, and finally Finnegans Wake. But I’ll never get to Finnegans Wake if I keep stopping to read books like The Frontier World of Doc Holliday. Even though it is quite an entertaining little affair.

I am certainly not suggesting that all gifted or lent books should be ridiculed, pulped, mothballed, or incinerated. My sisters have impeccable taste in crime fiction and know precisely which Ruth Rendell title to pass along next. But that’s about it. Acquaintances and neighbors, I do not trust. Well-wishers I find even more suspect. Sadly, these people are often unaware of my feelings. In many instances, they try to pass along books as a probing technique to answer the question “Is he really one of us?” That is, you can’t possibly care about the poor pre-Columbian denizens of this hemisphere unless you’ve read 1491 and its prequel, 1490. Correct. And you’re not really interested in the future of our imperiled republic unless you’ve read The No Spin Zone, The No Spin Zone for Children, 101 Things Stupid Liberals Hate About the No Spin Zone, and Anne Coulter on Spinoza. Again, right on target.

Some people may wonder, Why don’t you simply lie when people ask you about the books they’ve lent you? There are two problems with this sort of duplicity. One, lying is a mortal sin. Two, experienced off-fobbers of books will invariably subject their targets to the third degree: Were you surprised at Father Damien’s blasé reaction when his fingers started to rot off? What did you think of that snappy little ermine number Parsifal was wearing when he finally wrapped his pudgy little fingers around the Holy Grail? Were you caught off guard by those weird recipes for Sachertorte in The Tipping Point? How did you react when you found out that Father John was a Mescalero and not a Navajo? After reading The Frontier World of Doc Holliday, do you have more or less respect for Ike Clanton as a money manager? Pity the callow lendee who falls for the trick question and is unmasked as a fraud.

Because I live in a small town where I cross paths with profligate book lenders all the time, I have lately taken to hiding in subterranean caverns, wearing clever disguises while concealed in tenebrous alcoves, and feigning rare tropical illnesses such as Sabu’s Apnea to avoid being encumbered by any new reading material. Were I a younger man, I would be more than happy to take a peek at Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus, or Bob Weir’s intimate history of The Grateful Dead. But time is running out, and if I don’t get cracking soon, I’m never going to get to Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom, much less The Golden Bough.

Of course, the single greatest problem in accepting unsolicited books from friends is that it may encourage them to lend you others. Once you’ve told them how much you enjoyed How the Irish Saved Civilization, they’ll be at your front doorstep with How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Gifts of the Jews, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, and one day How the Bulgarians Invented Hip-Hop. If you tell them that you liked Why Sinatra Matters or Why Orwell Matters, you’re giving them carte blanche to turn up with Why Vic Damone Matters or Why G. K. Chesterton Still Rocks! When I foolishly lied to a friend about how much I enjoyed Kinks lead singer Ray Davies’s “unauthorized autobiography” X-Ray, she then upped the ante with a copy of Dave Davies’s Kink: An Autobiography: The Outrageous Story of My Wild Years as the Founder and Lead Guitarist of the Kinks. Surely, The Mick Avory Story: My Life as the Kinks’ Original Drummer and Pete Quaife: Hey, What Am I, the Kinks’ Bassist or a Potted Plant? cannot be far behind.

This is why I finally had to tell yet another friend that I hated a mildly interesting police procedural he’d dropped off. The novel dealt with a fictitious organization called the Vermont Bureau of Investigation and was actually quite good. But when I found out that there were at least eleven other books in the series and realized that my friend might own all of them, I feared that I would never, ever get to Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life at this rate. And at No. 2,127 on my list, Unamuno might only just get in under the wire anyway.

• • • • • •

My reading habits, deranged or not, are colored by regional and class bias. I will not read books where the main character attended private school. The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, A Good School, and the Harry Potter books are all beyond the pale, as are Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The History Boys. I also will not read books by P. G. Wodehouse, a poncey aristocrat who played footsie with the Nazis during the fall of France. There are crimes that can be forgiven—arson, bestiality, cheating on one’s income taxes—but this is not one of them. I do not enjoy books by authors who seem to assemble their novels brick by brick, like Thomas Mann and Sinclair Lewis, and I avoid at all costs books about melancholy WASPs, teens with social anxiety disorders, and immigrants who simply will not take no for an answer.

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a copy of David Benioff’s City of Thieves. The novel had come highly recommended to me, and as I had already seen Spike Lee’s affecting film 25th Hour, which is based on Benioff’s first novel, I was really looking forward to reading the book. City of Thieves, set during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941, deals with a Russian teenager who will be shot by Stalin’s police unless he can get his hands on a dozen eggs that will be used to bake a wedding cake for a Russian colonel’s daughter. Since cannibalism has already broken out in the city, eggs are clearly going to be hard to come by. So, as I opened to the first page, I was primed for a rip-roaring adventure.

But almost immediately, my elation faded. The narrator, the young boy’s grandson, reveals on page two that after the war his grandfather came to America and became a “devout” New York Yankees fan. I found this revelation crushing. The idea that someone who had lived through the awe-inspiring siege of Leningrad would then voluntarily join the evil empire in the Bronx struck me as morally repellent. So I set the book aside and donated it to my library. Maybe some Yankees fan would enjoy it. I sure wouldn’t.

I do not object to Yankees fans in principle, so long as they are homegrown, preferably natives of the Bronx or Yonkers. (Yankees fans born in Queens or Brooklyn, it goes without saying, are Iscariots.) But those of us who grew up in rabid, inbred sports towns like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston cannot stomach the kind of parvenu, out-of-town front-runner who becomes a “die-hard” Yankees fan without any moral, cultural, ethnic, genetic, or geographical connection with the team. Particularly repulsive are the ones in pink Yankees caps that you routinely run across in Tangier, Zagreb, Mombasa, the Hague.

In the case of City of Thieves, it struck me that a survivor of the heroic Siege of Leningrad—an underdog par excellence—would have a moral obligation to become a Dodgers fan and then perhaps later morph into a Mets fan after the Bums deserted Flatbush, because these teams are famously downscale and downtrodden and Democratic. The man’s arrival in New York would roughly coincide with the opening scene of Don DeLillo’s Underworld—a book I have read—which has the Dodgers facing off against the Giants at the Polo Grounds. Even though I grew up hating both these teams, neither of them is what you would call “evil.” Nor are the Mets, who are merely annoying. But it is simply unconscionable that a survivor of the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad would later become a Yankees fan. Stalin would have been a Yankees fan. There’s a guy who loved to gang up on the weak and defenseless. There’s a front-runner if there ever was one.

My refusal to read books about the Yankees or their slimy fans also extends to books written by supporters of the team. Thus, when I learned that Salman Rushdie had taken a shine to the Yankees, it eliminated any chance that I would ever read The Satanic Verses, no matter how good it is. This vindictive attitude is rooted partly in principle and partly in pathology: I, like most Americans, resent the Yankees’ success, wishing that my own cheapskate teams would also go out and purchase championships by the fistful. But I further reject the notion that Yankees fans experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat the way the rest of us do. They are fans who have not paid their dues. Yankees fans, not to put too fine a point on it, suck, and the rest of us do not. Rooting for the Yankees, as a friend of mine who roots for the Cubs says, is like rooting for the air. It’s about as daring as rooting for a pack of ravenous pit bulls in a showdown with a blind, one-legged bunny rabbit.

My revulsion does not end with the Yankees. I also refuse to read books whose characters or authors have any affiliation whatsoever with the Dallas Cowboys, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Duke University men’s basketball team, the University of Southern California football team, or Manchester United, the Yankees’ vile, English, soccer-playing twin. All of these entities are irredeemably wicked. So implacable is my hatred of Man United—glamour boy David Beckham’s old team—that when I met the gifted mystery writer Val McDermid at the Dublin Writers Festival a couple of years ago and found out that she was a Manchester United fan (even though, to the surprise of exactly no one, she is not from Manchester), I immediately unloaded all of my Val McDermid mysteries and started bad-mouthing her work to my friends. I’m dead serious about this stuff.

Happily, there are precious few novels that mention the Yankees, the Lakers, the Cowboys, or Manchester United. This is no accident. Editors have long understood that allowing an author to link his characters with a widely execrated franchise would turn off millions of potential readers, so they have gently urged these authors to excise such references, particularly if they occur early in the book, when the reader is still making up his mind whether it is worthwhile plowing ahead. Here are a few examples of passages that were wisely deleted from famous writers’ manuscripts before they went to the printers:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Charles Darnay was rooting for the ripping side fielded by the Jacobins while Sydney Carton was all agog about those first-rate chaps from Manchester United . . .

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

For a long time I would go to bed early and conceal myself under the covers, munching stale madeleines my governess had secluded in her apron, all the while reading about the latest thrilling exploits of the Bronx Bombers . . .

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the trees, making it hard to pick up the radio broadcast of the Michigan-USC game.

—Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. So Rochester suggested that we all take in the Spurs–Man United Cup Final.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe. I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Lakers tickets still available.”

—Albert Camus, The Stranger

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Like Gehrig batting cleanup.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

You can see what I mean about this thing.

• • • • • •

One day a few years back, I stumbled upon a remarkable book called The Talisman of Troy. Penned by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, the book chronicled the adventures of Diomedes, a second-tier character in The Iliad, after the fall of Troy. Bristling with prose like “Anchialus shuddered: in that boy was the awesome power of the son of Peleus, but not a crumb of his father’s piety, nor his hospitable manners,” Talisman of Troy advanced the theory that Helen of Troy had not really been abducted by Paris, son of Priam, but had deliberately gone to Asia Minor in order to get her hands on a sacred totem—the talisman of Troy—that would enable women to rule the world. The book was thus one of life’s unalloyed pleasures: an uncompromisingly stupid novel in a world filled with stupid novels that do make compromises. And, by virtue of its faux-Hellenophilic inanity and all-purpose Delphic hootiness, it was a powerful weapon in the hands of those of us who work night and day to resist the tyranny of the good.

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They only read good books, they only see good movies, they only listen to good music, they only discuss politics with other Democrats, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t; it makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly with their time, as if taking off fifteen minutes to page through The Da Vinci Code is a crime so horrific, an offense in such flagrant violation of the trans-celestial laws of intellectual resource management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the New York Review of Books Meta-fictional Flame. In their view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered, but far worse is that this misappropriation of precious minutes and even seconds also constitutes a crime against humanity. People like this also act as if the rest of humanity is monitoring their time sheet.

Those of us who occasionally delve into extraordinarily bad books like The Talisman of Troy recognize that such prissy attitudes are neurotic and self-defeating. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad books are an essential part of life, as entertaining and indispensable as extremely bad clothing (retro polyester shirts, two-sizes-too-small hockey jerseys on fatsoes), unbelievably bad music (John Tesh at Red Rocks, Phil Collins anywhere), incredibly bad trends (metrosexuality, deliberately not using toilet paper for a year), and stupefyingly bad politicians (take your pick). I started reading extremely bad books as a boy when my beloved but slightly unhinged Uncle Jerry lent me the classic Reds-under-the-beds screed None Dare Call It Treason, and I have been reading them ever since.

Indeed, one of the reasons I became a book reviewer was that it gave me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly moronic books and get paid for it. One of my first assignments was to review Wess Roberts’s jubilantly idiotic Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, which contained the line “Our songs, dances, games, jests and celebrations must always remain steadfast as propitious opportunity to renew our allegiance and identity as Huns.” I can well remember my breathless reaction when I was handed this assignment by my editor: “Let me get this straight: I’m going to get to read sentences like ‘Being a leader of the Huns is often a lonely job,’ and you’re going to pay me for it?” For, to be perfectly honest, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun was so bad I would have read it for free.

But people who only read good books cannot understand such a mentality.

“Why would you read Star: A Novel by Pamela Anderson when you could read The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño?” they ask. The answer is: “I would not rather read Star: A Novel by Pamela Anderson than The Savage Detectives. But I would rather read Star: A Novel by Pamela Anderson than one more novel about an enigmatic woman in a famous painting or one more book where the main character suffers from Asperger’s syndrome or Tourette’s and gets on everybody’s nerves for 350 pages. Anyway, I already read The Savage Detectives, and I need a night off.”

I do not read bad books frequently, and now that I am in the autumn of my life, I tend to limit my down-market diversions to extravagantly bad books that I have taken great pains to pick out myself. But I will never completely stop reading bad books, just as I will never completely stop ordering the disgusting curly fries at Arby’s. Shockingly bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep our brains active. Good books don’t make you think, because the author has already done all the thinking for you, but a terrible book can really give your brain a workout, because you spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say next. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad, but not exquisitely bad, is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. It is the difference between movies starring Stallone and movies starring Van Damme. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: He never tried to be a poor man’s Raymond Chandler; his work was unadulterated swill. I feel the same way about the Loins of Telemachus and Cuirass of the Myrmidons books: It is the fact that they are so clunky and dumb that makes them so much fun. The more unreadable, the merrier.

Let me stress that in making my pitch for impossibly bad books, I am not being camp. “Camp” is an intellectually duplicitous posture derived from the idea that something indisputably bad can be transmuted into something good by virtue of the reader’s knowing, “ironic” perspective on its breathtaking atrociousness. That is not what I am talking about here. At no point do I ever lose sight of the fact that bad books are truly bad. But it is their very badness that reminds us of the good books of which they are pallid copies; they are like the mud that reminds us of the absent splendors of the sun. The Bridges of Madison County is a corn shucker’s Madame Bovary, The Talisman of Troy is The Odyssey without Odysseus, Newt Gingrich’s 1945, where the Nazis have won the war in Europe, is a Bizarro World version of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.

Woefully bad books fall into three broad categories: the stupid, the mega-stupid, and the ones written by O. J. Simpson. Each has its own inimitable charms. Stupid books range from anything with the word “rapture” in the title to investment guides linking the yield curve with the teachings of Nostradamus. Mega-stupid books try to explain how to hold better meetings or motivate slackers by imitating the cruel but well-organized Shaka Zulu. And then there are cultural oddities like O. J. Simpson’s obscene I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions. In it, the then-imprisoned Simpson said of his wife, who perished under mysterious circumstances that still leave the experts stumped: “Like every person, Nicole had her faults. She blamed other people for her problems when she was unhappy. But the way she treated our kids when they were born, that made up for all the rest of it.” No sirree, no aficionado of insanely bad books will want to be without a copy of this humdinger.

I am certainly not suggesting that all bad books are as boundlessly entertaining as these monstrosities. Despite being one of the worst books ever written, Atlas Shrugged is no fun at all, and the uninterrupted stream of inert balderdash that flows from Jimmy Carter’s pen provides even fewer laughs than his presidency did. This is because famous people tend to write bad books in a predictable, tastefully dreary style, or to have run-of-the-mill bad books written for them by routinely crummy ghostwriters, whereas rank amateurs and ding-dongs pull out all the stops and go for the gold, venturing into forbidden territory where rank professionals would fear to tread. Jimmy Carter couldn’t write a book as bad as O. J. Simpson if he tried.

One of the main reasons those of us who love bad books go out of our way to make our sentiments known is that it is a way of resisting the hegemony of good taste. If slaves to quality had their way, there would be no thrillers by Marilyn Quayle (Embrace the Serpent), no children’s books by Madonna (Lotsa de Casha), no autobiographies by Geraldo Rivera (Exposing Myself). If goodness fetishists were in control of the publishing industry, nothing more hair-raising than Darryl Hannah’s autobiography would ever make it into print. That’s right, no books by Shaq, no memoirs by Susan Boyle or David Lee Roth or Rue McClanahan, no collections of racist ruminations by Dinesh D’Souza. Sound like a world you’d want to live in?

Garrison Keillor once wrote: “A good newspaper is never quite good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.” The same goes for bad books. Some people would identify a passion for bad books as a guilty pleasure, but I think of it as a pleasure I do not feel the least bit guilty about, even though I probably should. Bad movies, bad hairdos, bad relationships, and bad Supreme Court rulings merely make me chuckle. Bad books make me laugh. And if they ever stop writing books with lines like “Being a leader of the Huns is often a lonely job,” I don’t think I want to be here anymore.

• • • • • •

I used to wonder why it took me so long to get around to reading certain books in my personal library. Why was I rereading and then re-rereading Portnoy’s Complaint and The Great American Novel and Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Go-Between and even Flashman when I still hadn’t gotten around to reading Nabokov’s Bend Sinister and Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus? Then one day I hit upon the answer when I took a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on a trip to Los Angeles. I had not read Mark Twain’s chef d’oeuvre since my teens but had fond memories of that most unlikely of high school experiences—reading an assigned work I did not loathe. Now, decades later, I had every confidence that this experience would be repeated.

It was not. This, however, was not Twain’s fault; I simply could never get physically comfortable with the book. The problem was the packaging. My copy, which was lying around the senior citizen center that my wife runs out of the goodness of her, though certainly not my, heart, was a traditional Bantam Classic, but the cover was a photo from the 1993 Walt Disney film version of the novel. It was typically nauseating Disney iconography, depicting a promiscuously cute little Huck, played by a very young Elijah Wood, and a surprisingly dapper Jim (Courtney Vance) sashaying through the woods into a gorgeous sunset. Tucked inside were photos of Huck sucking on a corncob pipe, dickering with the duke and the dauphin, posing as an English valet. Every time I picked up the book, my eyes were lured back to those fulsome photos of Sugarplum Huck. I do not know what Huck looked like as Twain imagined him, any more than I know how F. Scott Fitzgerald pictured Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby cannot look like Robert Redford, and the most memorable character in American fiction cannot look like the very young, very cuddly Elijah Wood. Cannot, cannot, cannot.

I ditched the Bantam edition of Huck and, when I returned home, fished out a second copy I owned. But the experience was exactly the same. The cover of the Signet Classic was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buckteeth prominent, clutching an apple, sporting a perky little tam cocked at a saucy Depression era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to Jerry Mathers of Leave It to Beaver. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.

All this prompted me to think more closely about magnificent books I had resisted reading over the years. The first to come to mind was Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. When I was in high school, the assigned version of Miller’s seminal play had a grim, depressing green-and-brown cover depicting a stubby, doomed man with his back to the viewer, clutching a case filled with merchandise for which no buyer could possibly be found. I was living in a sub-par neighborhood at the time, and my dad was out of work, so it never seemed like that play was going to be as uplifting as The Black Arrow. So I never read it. A few years ago, when the New York Public Library mounted an exhibition of famous book covers—The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Soul on Ice—I avoided the building until the show closed.

Spurred on by this recollection, I recently conducted an inventory of my collection to see how many unread books had unsightly, off-putting covers. The results knocked me for a loop. In one bookcase sat rows and rows of beautiful Penguin Classics. Beneath them sat my favorite novels, all of which had very nice packaging, ranging from the catchy (Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) to the elegant (Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever) to the ominous (Robert Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse). And beneath them were a few dozen gorgeous art books.

But in the next room, in the cabinet where I keep my unread books, I was stunned to realize how many of these neglected works were eyesores. Some were bland or ugly because they dated from earlier eras, when little effort went into packaging, or because they came from England. Particularly ghastly was the 1951 hardcover edition of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a putrid aquamarine collection of Patrick White stories called The Cockatoos, and an uninspiring-looking collection entitled The Portable Dorothy Parker, adorned with a photo that made Parker look like the least amusing woman who ever lived, with the possible exception of my intransigently dour Aunt Norah.

What shocked me most was that some of the least appetizing covers were relatively new. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, issued in paperback in 1985, was chartreuse, orange, and baby blue, a lethal combination even Milton Avery would have shied away from. My Reagan-era edition of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute suggested an out-of-date employee handbook: A Handy Guide to Your Feminist 401-K! The decrepit Vintage edition of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives that I own looked worse than she did.

It all added up. Until now, I’d thought that I had set these books aside for so many years because they were too daunting or, in the case of Thomas Mann, too dull. Now I realized that this was not the explanation for the long delays. What these books had in common was that they were ugly. Really, really ugly. The 1987 hardback edition of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is a drab rip-off of a Balthus street scene. The 1991 hardback edition of Thomas C. Reeves’s A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy looks like some flunky in the design department pasted clip art onto the cover just seconds before the galleys were being shipped to the printer. A 1997 edition of The Bad Seed comes adorned with a photograph of a creepy doll that bears an odd resemblance to a girl I sat next to in fifth grade.

Gradually, I realized that the books I had put off reading for so long were united not by being too demanding or too turgid but by the fact that their covers literally screamed: “Pulp me! Pulp me!” I’d owned Jorge Luis Borges’s A Personal Anthology for thirty-five years but had never opened it, because the cover looked like somebody had smeared Gulden’s mustard all over it. Unsightly covers may also be the reason I’d never taken a crack at Celtic Fairy Tales, A History of the Global Stock Market from Ancient Rome to Silicon Valley, or the classic Kingsley Amis romp Girl, 20. Graphic vileness was also the common denominator linking Stock Market Logic, Three Plays by Sean O’Casey, Can You Drill a Hole Through Your Head and Survive?, History of the Conquest of Peru, The Crying of Lot 49, L’Assomoir, and even The Satanic Verses. Though in that case the author’s passion for the New York Yankees was also a major contributing factor. The double-whammy effect, as it were.

I was overjoyed to make this discovery. For years I thought I’d put off reading The Gulag Archipelago because of concerns that it might depress me. Wrong. Now I realized why I had never gotten very far into Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden. At long last it became clear why I had so long resisted taking Climate: The Key to Understanding Business Cycles or A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World or The Story of Stupidity: A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Moment You Saw This Book out for a test drive. It wasn’t the subject matter that had deterred me, lo, these many years. It was the packaging.

Elated that I had solved this mystery, I raced out and bought a copy of Huckleberry Finn with a passable cover. I loved it! Then I did the same with Nicholas Nickleby. Fantastic! I then moved on to Dr. Faustus, a book I had tried to plow through a half-dozen times. No problem! That only left one more magic mountain to climb. I raced off to the library, checked out a copy of Death of a Salesman that came with perfectly inoffensive packaging, and retreated to my bed for a nice, long read.

I hated every word of it.

So much for that theory.

• • • • • •

For most of my life I trusted the frothy kudos that appeared on the backs of books and would consult them before deciding whether or not to read the book in my hand. If Barry Hannah, a writer I admired, said that James Crumley, a writer I did not know, “works with fever on the brow,” I’d go out and see if this was true. It was. If Michael Ondaatje said that Alistair MacLeod was Canada’s best-kept secret, I would buy one of his books to see if this was in fact the case. It was. It was comments by noteworthy, reliable, honest writers that led me to W. G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, James Salter, Primo Levi, Dara Horn, Hjalmar Söderberg, and Jean-Patrick Manchette.

When I was in my mid-thirties, an enthusiastic comment by John Updike introduced me to William Trevor. Prior to reading Updike’s praise, I had never even heard of Trevor. I took his comments so seriously that I read all of Trevor’s books over the next eighteen months. He immediately became one of my favorite writers. Interestingly enough, I had always admired Updike as a critic, particularly as an art critic, but had never warmed to him as a writer. Too much Keystone State angst. Trevor, I think, is a better writer than Updike. Updike may have known this; he praised Trevor to the skies anyway. I never encountered another writer whose judgment I trusted as much. Ethics-wise, most writers could give the Whore of Babylon a run for her money.

I also liked Updike the man. I once met him in the green room of a television show, and we chatted for half an hour. We mostly talked about art. His segment had been delayed so that a cabal of political hacks could gasbag with choreographed anguish about a colleague’s death. The dead man later had a street named after him in Washington, D.C. Updike, now deceased, did not. But the novelist, unlike the stone-dead bureaucrat, will be remembered. Updike, I recall clearly, was anything but full of himself. He was, I think, the only famous person I have ever met who did not seem like a velociraptor. He was certainly the only writer.

A few times over the years, I have discovered writers because of an enthusiastic appraisal of their work in a newspaper or magazine. One day I read a review declaring that Penelope Fitzgerald was the greatest living English-speaking writer. To be fair, the competition was not especially stiff—basically, just William Trevor. This was the first I’d ever heard of Penelope Fitzgerald, and by the time I got my hands on The Bookshop, she was dead. She had not begun writing fiction until she was sixty years old, a great misfortune for all of us. I read The Bookshop first and liked it so much that I immediately moved on to Offshore and The Golden Child and my favorite, Human Voices, and within a year I had read eight of her nine novels.

I have saved her ninth novel, Innocence—a book I have yet to lay eyes on—for a later date. The others I have now gone through at least twice. Obviously, if I wanted to complete the set, I could go online and order the book. How plebeian. To order the book online, to procure it by overnight shipment, would wreck everything. It would strip my life of all the magical, unscientific qualities I most value. It would remove it from the realm of serendipity, the only place I have ever felt truly comfortable. If I went out of my way to acquire Innocence, rather than waiting to stumble upon it or have someone break down and buy me a copy just to get me to shut up about it after so many years, it would cast everything I hold dear into doubt. Thereafter, the world would be structured and sensible and unbearable. One day, when I least expect it, I will duck out of the rain into a bookstore in Harrisburg or Laguna Beach or Walla Walla and happen upon Innocence. It will be one of the great events in my life. It will confirm my belief that the book has been waiting for me all these years, biding its time, keeping a low profile, confident that I would one day wander in and snap it up. The pilgrimage is everything. The destination means nothing.

Until that moment, I will have to make do with my emergency reserves. Prior to trying her hand at fiction, Fitzgerald wrote three well-received biographies. One was about the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. I own it. I despise the Pre-Raphaelites, with all those marinated Ophelias and frizzy-haired waifs; where did these jokers get off criticizing Raphael? Andrew Lloyd Webber collects Burne-Jones, and it’s not hard to see why. But I will eventually read the book anyway, because Fitzgerald has given me so much pleasure over the years. Perhaps she will change my mind about the Pre-Raphaelites. I doubt it. She will certainly not change my mind about Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Being handed a map leading to buried treasure like Penelope Fitzgerald is an increasingly rare experience today. Critics are mostly servile muttonheads, lacking the nerve to call out famous authors for their daft plots and slovenly prose. Academics fear that an untoward word will hurt them somewhere down the line when their own daft, slovenly books come up for review. Blurbs in particular can no longer be trusted. Usually they are written by liars and sycophants to advance the careers of bozos and sluts. In many cases authors will call in favors from friends who praise books they know to be dismally inadequate. This is volitionally cruel, because writers know that other writers hate writing blurbs. They hate it when their editors ask for them, and they hate it when agents ask for them, and they really hate it when their friends ask for them. Being asked to write a blurb for a friend is like being asked to give a friend’s gross, dysfunctional kid a summer job. I may like you; that doesn’t mean I have to like your swinish progeny. The reason writers hate writing blurbs for friends is because, no matter what they say, their friends will be upset that they did not shower them with even more immoderate praise. And in any case, envious trolls who will never be in a position to roll logs in a generally whorish manner will accuse them of being log-rolling whores. Conversely, writers hate writing blurbs for strangers, because it forces them to read books they do not want to read, at a point when time itself is running out on them. All blurbs should be written before the age of fifty; after that, one should never read a book one does not want to read, unless there is money in it.

Purists can decode blurbs to see the procrustean contortions a writer had to put himself through in order to be able to praise a friend without actually praising his book. “No one sets up a scene better than . . .” is how Trevor once described a book of short stories by a writer I like too much to criticize here. This may or may not be true. Whatever the case, the stories themselves were dull and undistinguished. Trevor, to his credit, never said that the book was any good. He merely said that the author was good at setting up scenes. He didn’t say that he was good at finishing them. The ability to praise a colleague without actually recommending his work is sometimes referred to in the trade as Pirandello’s Last Finesse. Colleagues will gaze at such ingeniously obtuse wordplay and marvel.

“This dude hasn’t lost anything on his fastball,” they will say. “He can still bring the ambiguous thunder.”

Quotations clipped from book reviews that do not identify the author are worthless. The San Francisco Chronicle did not say that a newly published novel evoked both Lao-Tzu and Groucho Marx. Some writer said it. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did not find a book miraculously prescient. Some journalist did. El Correo, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, El Mundo, Blekinge Läns Tidning, Berner Zeitung, and, of course, Leben und Glauben are not in a position to pass judgment on anything. They are amorphous. If a quote doesn’t have a name attached to it, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s of no use to anyone if some unidentified churl at El Globe & Mail de Santiago rakes Isabel Allende’s latest novel over the coals. For all we know, the person writing the review could be Augusto Pinochet’s spiteful, out-of-wedlock grandson, Paco.

Once upon a time, book reviewers used a panoply of adjectives to describe books. All that changed on February 11, 1997, when a top-secret directive from the National Academy of the Arts was issued to American book reviewers stipulating that they must use the word “astonishing” at some point in their review or they would not get paid. “Astonishing” is a much better word than “luminous” or “incandescent,” because it is gender-neutral, whereas “luminous” and “incandescent” and even “wise” are code for “Only divorced middle-aged women with cats who listen to Fresh Air every afternoon will enjoy this book.” The problem with incandescent or luminous books is that they veer toward the provincial and the abstruse, focusing with alarming frequency on bees, Provence, or Vermeer. I prefer books that go off like a Roman candle. When I buy a book, I don’t want to come away illuminated. I want to get blown right out of the water by the author’s jaw-dropping pyrotechnics. I want to come away astonished.

Several years back, literally overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed each year by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program whereby I would only read books that at least one reviewer had described as “astonishing.” Thus, I was overjoyed by the great news that Alice McDermott’s new novel, After This, was absolutely astonishing, because while I’d heard terrific things about her previous books, I could never recall anyone using that specific term to describe them. As a result, I’d never tried any. Having recently picked up Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock, which the Seattle Times described as “astonishing,” and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, deemed “an intense, astonishing work of art” by no less an arbiter of taste than O, The Oprah Magazine, I was rounding out the year with a troika of masterpieces that promised to be nothing short of astonishing.

And the hits kept coming. Typical was the treatment accorded Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, whose novel The New Life was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “an astonishing achievement.” This happened at roughly the same time that Ayelet Waldman came out with Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, which, while not astonishing in and of itself, did include a character that reviewer Andrew Sean Greer described as “astonishing.” Almost simultaneously, Abigail Thomas published A Three Dog Life, singled out by Entertainment Weekly as “astonishing,” an “extraordinary” love story—“Grade: A.” Personally, I find the Grade A business a smidgen redundant; if a book is astonishing, you’re obviously not going to give it a B.

Some people may protest that it is ridiculous to make book-buying or book-reading decisions purely on the basis of a single adjective. Perhaps. But let me stress that while I only cozy up to books that have been designated “astonishing,” I do not read every single “astonishing” book. For example, I shied away from M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, even though it won a National Book Award for young people’s literature. Just because the author himself used the term “astonishing” to describe his subject doesn’t automatically make the book astonishing; it could be merely stellar, sensational, a real page-turner, or absolutely, positively unputdownable. For somewhat different reasons, I avoided “an astonishing thriller” I read about in an ad in The New Yorker, because this assessment came from one Linda Grana of the Lafayette Bookstore in Lafayette, California. Linda Grana may be a critic of the first water, on the same level as Samuel Johnson and Scott Peck and Oprah, but if the word “astonishing” does not appear as part of a review by a designated cognoscente in a mainstream publication, I do not buy the putatively astonishing product. I can’t be buying books just because somebody in a bookstore somewhere said they were astonishing. I’d go broke.

Are there ever times when I worry that my obsession with the word “astonishing” prevents me from reading a great book? Sure. But the truth is, if nobody describes a book as astonishing, it probably isn’t astonishing, and if it isn’t astonishing, who needs it? When Marilynne Robinson’s long-awaited Gilead finally appeared a few years ago, it was variously described as “poignant,” “absorbing,” “lyrical,” “meditative,” and “perfect.” It was also called “magnificent,” “a literary miracle,” “Grade A,” and, yes, “incandescent.” But nowhere did I see anyone refer to it as “astonishing.” I’ve already explained how I feel about incandescent books; if I had a nickel for every incandescent novel I’ve ever read, I could retire tomorrow. But I don’t, so I can’t, and I sure as hell am not going to keep falling back into the same old habits. First book that doesn’t leave me astonished, your mistake; second book that doesn’t leave me astonished, my mistake.

I do not mind when blurbs or pull-quotes are misleading. I do mind when they are absurd. In recent times, I have discovered that the snippets of praise that adorn books have taken on a preposterously hyperbolic tone. The fawnatisti now routinely resort to untenable, indefensible, and sometimes ludicrous analogies that do a disservice to both the author and the reader. I have lost track of the number of times I have seen contemporary writers described as “a latter-day Chekhov.” Perhaps the blurberistas have simply reached the conclusion that everyone in this society is a dope and no one is keeping score. But some of us are keeping tabs on things. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to other readers, and we owe it to Chekhov.

Last year I read a book of short stories called There Are Jews in My House. It was the work of a young Russian writer who emigrated to New York in 1994. What initially attracted me to the collection was the incredibly enthusiastic comments that appeared on the dust jacket. “Lara Vapnyar is Jane Austen with a Russian soul” is how resident New Yorker sage Louis Menand put it. Chimed in André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir: “One is tempted to name Anton Chekhov, or Nina Berberova, or Katherine Mansfield, but the book that springs to mind is Dubliners.”

Wait a minute: Whose mind does that temptation spring to? Not mine. And are we talking about Dubliners, as in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the greatest collection of stories ever written? Or are we talking about Fast Eddie McGettigan’s Dubliners? Because if we are talking about James Joyce’s Dubliners, my reaction would be: Whoa, Nelly. Consider the material. The title story in There Are Jews in My House deals with a Russian gentile who briefly offers a hiding place to a Jewish friend during the Nazi occupation of Russia, even though she secretly resents her friend’s happier marriage, curvier figure, and more outgoing personality and isn’t all that broken up when her friend finally shoves off. Another centers on a prudish young math teacher who is given the mortifying assignment of teaching a sex education class for young girls. A third features a little boy in Brooklyn who suspects that his grandfather might be having it off with an old flame from back in the land of the sultry Babushka. They are all good stories, nicely written, all touching in some way, all just this side of sentimental but never mawkish. But none of them in any way brings to mind the caustic, unsentimental, highly stylized, and somewhat over-the-top work of Jane Austen, and none of them even vaguely suggests the work of James Joyce. Particularly nonevocative of Jane Austen are the sentences from Vapnyar’s story “A Question for Vera”: “Vova Libman didn’t care if he was a boy or a girl; he cried all the time. He cried, and when he calmed down, he picked his nose and ate his boogers.”

I don’t know how much of Emma and Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility Louis Menand has read, but let me tell you this: There are no boogers in the work of Jane Austen. Not a one. How on earth could critics manage to jump from Lara Vapnyar to Jane Austen without so much as a pause for Eudora Welty or Katherine Anne Porter? How did they get from There Are Jews in My House to Dubliners without making a pit stop for Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America or The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories by Carson McCullers? This criticism is no reflection on the talented Lara Vapnyar. It is, rather, a reflection on a passel of critics and blurbmeisters that have simply lost their minds.

However nice and generous it may be to compare young writers who are just getting out of the starting gate to the undisputed titans of Western literature, it isn’t really fair to the writers themselves, and it isn’t really helpful to anyone else. Rookie first basemen who break in with the Yankees do not automatically get compared to Lou Gehrig. First-term presidents are not immediately likened to Honest Abe. Twenty-something painters are never spoken of in the same breath as Velázquez. Scientists who have just earned their Ph.D.’s are not discussed in the same terms as Albert Einstein. In most fields of human endeavor, you have to get a few points on the scoreboard before anyone starts talking about you as if you were the second coming of Alexander the Great or Leonardo da Vinci or Werner Heisenberg or Pelé or even Cher. Comparing freshly published authors who are still wet behind the ears to James Joyce and Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov isn’t just unfair to the dead; it’s unfair to the living. No one can measure up to that kind of homage. Not even Jonathan Franzen.

This brings us to the least-discussed subject in the world of belles lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic. Writers frequently complain that a critic who reviewed their book is vicious, crass, and ignorant. But that is only when they are talking about me. In my own experience as a reader who pays heed to reviews, I take an entirely different tack. To me, book reviewers in general are just too darned nice. And I know whereof I speak. A few years ago Bruce McCall wrote a flattering notice about my book My Goodness: A Cynic’s Short-Lived Search for Sainthood. I was gratified by the praise, particularly coming from someone I admired and envied. But toward the end of the review, McCall said something that caught me totally by surprise. “Somewhere,” he wrote, “Mencken is beaming.”

No, he wasn’t. H. L. Mencken, a self-absorbed curmudgeon and all-purpose snob, wouldn’t have thought much of my piddling efforts. He looked down his nose at everybody, especially those not to the manor born. And he hated the Irish. So in generously asserting that Mencken was beaming at my efforts, McCall could not have been more wrong. H. L. Mencken, now or then, dead or alive, couldn’t have cared less what some pathetic third-generation Mick like me wrote. He wouldn’t beam at my writing if his life depended on it. He was from Baltimore, where they keep the beaming at other people’s work to an absolute minimum.

Anyway, the book wasn’t all that good.

This is not the sort of thing you will hear from most writers. Authors like to bellyache. Authors are always complaining that critics missed the whole point of Few Mourn the Cameriere, or took the quote about the merry leper ballerinas out of context, or overlooked the allusions to John Millington Synge and Hildegard von Bingen, or didn’t mention that the author once jilted the critic after he kept begging her to go out on a double date dressed as one of the Boleyn sisters but maybe with an eye patch. Authors are always complaining that reviewers maliciously cited the least incandescent, least Pushkinian passages in the book; or have a grudge against them because of something that happened the night the Khmer Rouge or Joy Division broke up; or said mean things only because the author went to Georgetown while the reviewer had to settle for Villanova.

What makes all this grumbling so unseemly is that the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve no praise whatsoever. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next ten will roll over like compliant pooches and insist that it’s the most thought-provoking novel since The Idiot. Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road. Also, because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they view these assignments as a chore, serving up reviews that read like term papers or lightly reworded press releases, churned out by auxiliary sales reps masquerading as critics. This is particularly true in the mystery genre, where the last negative review was written in 1943.

There is nothing wrong with a needlessly effusive notice, nor any reason to suspect that the reviewer is being excessively servile because he seeks the author’s hand in marriage or expects similar treatment when his own book, Would That the Khedive Had Not Overslept, comes out in paperback. This does not alter the fact that such reviews are unfair to the reader, who may be hornswoggled into thinking that Raymond Chandler really would crack a smile and tip his hat at the author, or that the fledgling novelist has gone toe-to-toe with Joseph Conrad and given the ornery old cuss a proper thrashing. Books are described as being “compulsively readable” when they are merely “okay,” “jaw-droppingly good” when they are actually “not bad,” “impossible to put down” when they are really “no worse than the last three.” Authors are described as an alchemical synthesis of Madame de Staël, Alcuin of York, and Arthur Conan Doyle, or are said to write like Charlotte Brontë on acid or to have out-Dostoyevskyed Dostoyevsky and horsewhipped Heine, when they are in fact more of a cross between Candace Bushnell and Ngaio Marsh, or write like Nora Roberts on Robitussin-DM, or have narrowly out-Scottolined Lisa Scottoline and were lucky to play Anita Shreve to a draw.

The same authors who mope and whine about a negative comment here and there are only too glad to accept praise that is not warranted, accolades they do not deserve. But how often does an author ever come out and admit that the praise showered on his book was excessive, ill-considered, unseemly, or flat-out wrong? That’s the sort of thing that takes real moral fiber, real integrity, real guts. You know, like admitting that H. L. Mencken wouldn’t have been caught dead beaming at your book.

The worst thing about premature semi-hysterical adulation is that it places an enormous burden on the author to live up to expectations he himself did not create. The Angolan-born novelist José Eduardo Agualusa (Creole, The Book of Chameleons) has been extolled thusly: “Cross J. M. Coetzee with Gabriel García Márquez and you’ve got José Eduardo Agualusa, Portugal’s next candidate for the Nobel Prize.” To which I say: Cross “Let’s not go overboard here” with “Hold on a cotton-pickin’ second” and you’ve got “Yeah, maybe when pigs sprout wings.”

Just as authors dread being labeled “a poor man’s Francine du Plessix Grey” or “Moloch’s errand boy,” many authors live in fear of praise that is discomfitingly intimate or jarringly visceral. I for one would never want my work referred to as “a big dish of Beluga caviar, sailing in on a sparkling bed of rice, with a mother-of-pearl spoon,” as Alice Munro’s Runaway once was. I just wouldn’t. Personally, I do not feel that it is acceptable to describe someone’s writing as a big dish of beluga caviar sailing in on a sparkling bed of rice, even if it is. There’s a sinister chumminess to this kind of writing, suggesting that the reviewer may actually be daydreaming about the author in graphic cetacean terms. If I were Alice Munro, I’d add a couple of locks to the door. Dead bolts, in fact.

• • • • • •

If you can’t trust the reviewers anymore, whom can you turn to? Well, one superb innovation of recent times is the readers’ review section on Amazon.com. Here jes’ plain folks get to voice their opinions, acting as selfless, intrepid cultural watchdogs seeking to shield their fellow book lovers from duds. Certain individuals have built quite a reputation for themselves online, their trenchant, witty aperçus vying with the phoned-in ruminations of the snooty, burned-out hacks who masquerade as professionals at our top magazines and papers.

Of course, some reviewers can get a bit coarse and personal in the rough-and-tumble world of Internet facials, sending stunned top-flight authors home to lick their information highway wounds. But for the most part these gifted amateurs inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into the reviewing process. Most appealing is their absolute fearlessness when it comes to trashing high-profile authors whom mainstream reviewers would hesitate to mix it up with. Beholden to no man, cloaked in righteous anonymity, these reviewers do not hesitate to take even the brightest stars—Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Maeve Binchy—to the woodshed. This is what makes citizen reviewers such a welcome addition to the body politic: Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.

It’s always fun to go back in time and speculate on what might have happened had Jack the Ripper or the Venerable Bede been on Facebook, or had Pharaoh’s army been kitted out with state-of-the-art amphibious equipment. This is why I cannot help wondering what a typical Amazon.com review might have looked like had the Internet existed centuries ago:

King Lear: Average reader rating: . The author tells us: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Oh, right, like I didn’t know that? Like I didn’t know that to be or not to be is the question? Like I didn’t know that the fault lies not in us but in the stars? Tell me something I don’t know, Mr. Bard of Whatever.

Oedipus Rex: Average reader rating: . Sophocles is a satisfying author who writes in clear, snappy prose. Youngsters in particular could learn a lot by imitating Mr. Rex, until he goes a bit off the rails toward the end. Nothing earth-shattering here, but zippy stuff. Have to admit I’m still puzzled by the icky subplot involving Mr. Rex’s mother.

The 120 Days of Sodom: Average reader rating: . So I like totally preordered this book based on the title, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got here, I didn’t understand it at all. It just didn’t go anywhere. It just kept repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some parts of it were kind of gross.

The Aeneid: Average reader rating: . Whine, whine, whine! Okay, so your hometown burned to the ground and your family got wiped out, but do you have to keep bellyaching about it? Where’s that gonna get you, Mr. Grumpy-Biscuits? Basically, Virgil is a poor man’s Tacitus. He goes on and on about Priam and Dido and Zeus, when all the reader wants is to get to the good part when the Trojans start teeing off on the Vestal Virgins. And talk about a rip-off: He doesn’t even include the story about the one-eyed giant who can turn pigs into Greeks.

On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres: Average reader rating: ½. Those who have read my countless reviews elsewhere know that I am a mathematician, astronomer, polyglot, and philosopher in my own right and therefore uniquely qualified to discuss everything from Zeno’s Paradoxes to the Gordian knot. Mostly, I think my fellow polymath Copernicus has done a pretty solid job here. The thing most laymen don’t realize—unlike mathematicians/philosophers/astronomers/polymaths like me (as those familiar with my numerous other reviews can tell you)—is that people like Copernicus are really good with numbers. Just as I am. Really, really good. (Me, that is.) Readers seeking more of my unique insights can reach me at Igor@mymommysbasement.com.

Deuteronomy: Average reader rating: . I don’t get it. I’ve read most of the books in this series, and they totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was on the edge of my seat when I read Numbers. But this one runs out of gas early. Now I’m glad I skipped Leviticus!

And finally:

Mein Kampf: Average reader rating: . Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big words that normal people can’t understand, like Lebensraum and Oberkommandant and Wienerschnitzel? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what’s up with the Jewish thing?

In the end, I would still like to believe that the praise printed on the covers of books is not without value. At least some of it. If we are going to be disappointed, it is nice to know that we did not plunge into the tiger pit of our own free will, but were tricked into taking that blind leap and that’s why we wound up impaled on those razor-sharp spikes. Dipped in curare. And python venom. And dung. If I have to waste a few days reading a book that I’m going to end up hating, I’d prefer to do it because of somebody else’s recommendation. I don’t want this thing to be accidental. And I don’t want to take all the heat myself.

Sometimes our experiences stun us. Two years ago I read an amazing novella called Beauty Salon about a gay, cross-dressing Mexico City hairdresser who turns his business establishment into an AIDS hospice. I only picked Beauty Salon off the shelf because of a quote on the back cover written by Francisco Goldman, saying that Mario Bellatín’s books seemed like “gifts from the future.” I found this description disarmingly beautiful. It sounded like Goldman really meant this. He had crafted a gorgeous turn of phrase and given it away to another writer. This was breathtakingly generous.

Since Goldman had been so right about Bellatín, I decided to go ahead and read Goldman’s novel The Ordinary Seaman. It was about a group of luckless Central American rejects who find themselves marooned on a rat-infested ship all the way down on the Brooklyn docks. The ship will never see the high seas again, as it is nothing more than a prop in an insurance scam. The novel was based on a true story and was incredibly sad. It was a remarkable book. So then I decided to read a novel by an author—not a critic—whose considered praise—no phone-in jobs, please—accompanied the paperback version of The Ordinary Seaman, just to see how far I could go with this thing before I finally ran into a book I did not like. It never happened. The trail from Goldman led me to Oscar Hijuelos and later to Selden Rodman and Seán Virgo, and then on and on to a half-dozen other authors, and each time the aleatory daisy chain introduced me to yet another wonderful book.

The blurb trail ultimately led to a fantastic little novel called The House of Paper by the Uruguayan novelist Carlos María Domínguez. The House of Paper is a literary mystery in which a man comes upon a Joseph Conrad novel mailed to a recently deceased friend and travels all the way to Argentina to find out why it was sent to her. His quest leads him to a bibliophile so obsessed with his collection that he one day decides to hire workmen to build him a house on the oceanfront that will consist entirely of his books. But then a woman with whom he had a one-night stand in Mexico City at a literary conference many years in the past writes and asks for a particular book. The man cannot find it. He is beside himself. He tears the house apart, literally destroying it in the process, and when he finally locates the requested title, he ships it off to London. Alas, the woman who asked for it—the woman he spent that memorable night with in Mexico City fifteen years earlier—has just been run over by a car while daydreaming about Emily Dickinson.

I can readily imagine myself as one of the characters in this novel. That would be so much preferable to the life I am living now. I would love to build a house using books instead of bricks. I would love to be run over by a car while daydreaming about Emily Dickinson. Or maybe not “run over” so much as “plowed into” or perhaps even “ever so lightly grazed.” Either way, this sort of dramatic sign-off beats lung cancer any day of the week. I love reading books that I stumble upon in this way. It turns life itself into a jigsaw puzzle.

I found The House of Paper so mesmerizing that I did not need to follow the critical trail any further. I had made my point. Maybe someday I would come back and repeat the experiment. But not now. What I feared, perhaps, was that this was already turning into another one of my obsessions, that I would spend so much time following one highly recommended book to the next that I would never finish the dozens of other books I am currently working my way through, never finish off the Modern Library list of the 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century, never finish Ulysses, never find out how The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire turns out, and never reach the final page of Middlemarch.

I already had enough obsessions.