How to talk about books
Inspired by Bianca Bosker's great new book Get The Picture.
Despite loving to read and recommend books, I often struggle with how to describe a book or describe what I thought or felt about it.
As I care deeply about books and writers, it’s something I’d like to be better at and something I think about often. So, how can I successfully talk or write about a book that I’ve read?
Earlier this summer, I read Bianca Bosker’s brilliant new book Get The Picture. I loved her brutally honest and funny behind the scenes exploration of the NY art community and found that she also gave insightful advice on how to engage with art. Inspired by her experiences developing her critical and appreciative ‘eye’, she suggests two approaches that have stuck with me:
‘Stay in the work.’ Bosker repeats this idea often and uses it to remind herself that although context is hugely important in all art forms, that truly engaging with a piece of art- painting, sculpture, poem, or novel- you should stay in the work so that you notice what you see. Not what the context tells you to see.
‘Say 5 things you notice.’ I love the simplicity and immediateness of this, because of a lot of my hesitation when talking about books is that I’m not saying something clever and new. As Bosker says in the quote below, saying what she notices about a piece of art allows her to experience the art on her terms. It highlights what stands out to her, what resonates with her and which artistic decisions strike her as unexpected, uncomfortable, joyful.
“I think that, it was staying in the piece that really let me brush away the snobbery, step away from the context, and like I said, experience the art on my own terms, see it face to face with less pretence and more mystery than ever before.”
Last week I was away with my family on the Kent coast- hence no Substack posts!- and I read Abby Jimenez’s new romance novel Just For The Summer.
It’s the first of her novels that I’ve read and I loved it. I was surprised by it too. So, in next week’s post I’ll share the 5 things that I noticed about the novel to test out Bianca Bosker’s idea on fiction!
Now, here are some photos from Kent, if you’d like to see?
Have a lovely week friends! Let me know what you notice 😜.
I like your honesty, Emma! I, too, struggle with saying something new or clever in book reviews. I used to do a lot of book reviews, actually, but I tend to be a little too critical and honest, then swing to the other extreme and give five stars to books that really don't merit it. It's mostly because I'm querying, and I don't want a bad review to come back to bite me; I also am VERY mindful of how much work goes into even a crappy novel. (It occurs to me that this could be a good substack post. LOL)
Anyway, one thing I figured out is that almost no one is saying anything original or clever in their reviews ... and that authors don't necessarily care, as long as they get a decent 4 or 5 star rating and have their number of reviews boosted (hence driving it up in Amazon's algorithms). Read enough reviews and they all start to sound similiar, to be honest. (Especially the one star reviews, which are often so similiar that I think they're written by the same person under different AMazon accounts, but that's a completely different topic!)