“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it” — Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

Only a poorly written book would inspire me to get out of bed and write a blog about the volumes a book speaks about its reader. I’ve been reading a book called Delirium, which I started about two months ago–it seemed like a harmless read that happened to be a New York Times Bestseller and was shamelessly brandished on rollover splash display on the Barnes & Noble website during the Groupon “Spend $10 and Get $20-Worth-of-Books” promo. Oh, did I discreetly mention that it was written for the boy-crazy, hormonal lot that caused a Twilight pandemonium? The cover seemed a harmlessly flashy teal, which instantly won my weakness for visual appeal.

No matter how convinced I am that I’m attempting to become more disciplined and routine in my nightly reading ritual, I’m starting to think that it’s not the habit I’m unsuccessfully adopting. It’s the book. I ordered the book, thinking it would tickle the fancy of a hopeless romantic. Dead wrong. The book is sickeningly saturated with an immature concept of ‘amor’—the illogical, despairing kind that takes a hold of you when you’re pubescent and insecure over who says hi to you in the locker bay; I can’t get over how ill-constructed, poorly devised, and horribly shallow the book is. For the longest time, I wondered aloud, am I really turned on by a premise of a tragically insecure girl who is more or less (so far in the book) at the throes of a clinically diagnosed disease called Amor Deliria Nervosa and entranced by a vapid boy whose character is not remotely convincing? Farcical and offensive to everything I’ve been taught.

Then, I started to realize something. While it took me over two decades to dabble in different books, some being interesting enough to read more than halfway, others not so much, most collecting dust under heaps and columns on my bed stand, all dealing with the various fads I succumbed to, like coyote-like dogs, the environment, or unanimously popular readership, I’m finally picking up on the hints of my personality. I’ve picked novels based on their impressive written style, only to find the story line dreadfully uninteresting or overly complex and convoluted. I’ve selected others based on–such as this one–a classic theme that innocuously appealed to my tastes, and had to put them to their deaths after tortured months of strained reading, whereupon forgetting what they were even about, because they were terribly written.

I’ve had mild success with books-turned-to-indie-flicks (operative word being indie), because at least the splashy visual appeal is there for my lazy brain to cling to when the novel grows dull, and there’s some promise of dignified complexity being spelled out for the literal. More successful have been novels I’ve had to read for my college courses; while they were forced upon us for written exams and papers, it was during those dim-lit, miserable hours cramming that I quickly lost track of time and got over the tattered and dogeared corners to find a gem inside the 350 pages of professor-approved literature. By gem, I have found well-written, concise authorship with an incisive purpose to drive home a point in the protagonist’s struggle–more substantive than the more trying issues of today’s banal literature. About real struggles, like race, gender, one’s origins, and identity, which is interwoven with the suspense, drama, romance, intrigue that I so often naively search for in contemporary lit on the fleeting stands of bookstores. Why have I missed this?

Truly great literature happens when an author has something clever and well-developed to say, but is innovative enough to fashion it in a form that enthralls, humors, drives you to tears, and posits new ideas that never took place in the pathways of your brain before. It’s entertainment that is convincing enough to move you, enough to forget your own life, or even have the decency to draw a bridge into your own so you can arrive at more fleshed out, creative conclusions in your day-to-day struggles. Or, as Holden implies, when the author understands you enough to be your best friend.

Besides the fact that I’m picky, disgruntled, and in search of the perfect book (genre) with the perfect plot, my book tastes reveal plenty. I like non-fiction (a lot), especially books that explore simple human behavior explained through case-by-case scientific studies (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point). I enjoy reading about the predictability of human behavior, as well as the deviations from the norm–inconsistencies, freaks, and kinks in the system (no pun intended). I like solutions to problems, resolution, and straight-forwardness–books about consumer behavior, marriage/divorce paradigms, relationship success, effective communication, and self-help for issues that plague us. But I also like novels with a convincing and interesting plot, a deeper conflict at work that flows from the vein of the theme that interests me the most–love, and fighting for it across various obstacles, like time itself, cultural barriers, language barriers, racial differences. Delivery: clever, satirical, eloquent, poetic, but honest. Not overly descriptive or florid but evocative with less words. I appreciate novels that pose an overarching conclusion about the human struggle, books about weakness and strength, the female struggle, identity, self-awareness, existentialism, nonconformity, growth, and livelihood (i.e. Memoirs of a Geisha, The Bean Trees, Cat’s Cradle, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Their Eyes Were Watching God). Maybe it says much about where I am in life–I’m an intricate novel in progress.