Familiar flaws

I've read several thousand novels in my life, so many that whenever I'm immersed in a new book I can see all the flaws as well as the merits. Which doesn't mean I don't enjoy the book, it just means I'm unlikely to be gushing with praise. If it's really bad I won't be rereading it, it'll be off to the charity bookshop.

However many awards the book has picked up, however many celebrities have recommended it, if there are shortcomings or defects, I'll spot them pretty quickly as I'm well attuned to what's good writing and what isn't.

I'll react instantly to one-dimensional characters, an overabundance of characters, implausible plots, irrelevant sub-plots, clunky metaphors, rambling descriptions, high-flown language, confusing flashbacks and flash-forwards, factual inaccuracies and so on. They just leap out at me.

I always wonder why the author couldn't see all these faults when they were writing the book, or why their editor didn't see them and suggest some hefty rewriting. I can't be the only one who sees all the faults and wonders why they weren't corrected.

Not that I would ever stop reading books, however flawed and irritating they may be. I get huge pleasure out of reading. I love interesting characters and original plots and unexpected twists, I love trying to guess the endings, I love quirky oddballs I can easily identify with, I love sad, lonely characters who find love and happiness. And I love being whisked out of my familiar everyday surroundings to a completely different world someone else has imagined.

Books are a bit like people. They may have glaring faults but we overlook them because they also have endearing and inspiring qualities we can't do without. And we know they won't go on a drunken rampage or wreck the car.

Re the pic: I'd thoroughly recommend City of Girls. Beautifully written, very entertaining.

Spoil yourself

It's generally asssumed that book-readers don't like spoilers - too much information about the plot and what happens at the end. The big pleasure of reading is supposedly the "wait and see" element.

But an experiment by Californian psychologists suggests that actually this isn't true. They found that people who read stories containing spoilers actually enjoyed them more than the untouched version.

This took them by surprise, so much so that they're struggling to come up with any convincing explanation of why this might be. They wonder for instance if people reach a deeper understanding of a story when they aren't preoccupied with the plot and its complexities.

Journalist Alison Flood says that when reading a horror story she likes to check that the hero/heroine is still alive at the end. With romantic stories, she likes to find out straightaway who gets off with whom. She insists this unorthodox peeking doesn't affect her enjoyment at all.

Personally I don't like to be told the entire plot of a novel before I start reading it, though in some cases the plot is so fiendish that a summary I could refer to when totally confused would be handy (Nicole Krauss's The History of Love comes to mind).

And I do admit to thumbing through the pages to find out if my favourite character ends up alive or dead, or if the odious wife-beater eventually gets his come-uppance. Sometimes my curiosity is so great I just can't wait for another 200 pages to satisfy it.

But if the "wait and see" element is so crucial, how come we like rereading books, when we already know exactly what happens? Shouldn't we be throwing them in the dustbin?

Unputdownable or unreadable?

When is a book a good book? Is it only the literary critics who're expert enough to decide? Or is the ordinary reader's opinion just as valid?

I get constantly annoyed by the lingering belief that there's some kind of literary elite who know better than you and I what's a talented, well-crafted book and what's ham-fisted rubbish.

There's a continual assumption that only those who've studied literature at some fancy university, or hung out with famous authors, or are themselves authors, have enough discernment to tell the wheat from the chaff, the humdingers from the penny-dreadfuls.

I say this having just sampled two novels heaped with praise by the self-proclaimed experts, which seemed to me anything but praiseworthy. Everything from the plot to the characters to the writing itself seemed sadly lacking.

The cognoscenti of the book world would no doubt regard my opinions as worthless and uninformed. Yet I studied literature at school, I've read thousands of books and for many years I was a bookseller. Why would my opinions be any less valid than those of the literati?

Nobody would suggest that ordinary football fans are incapable of worthwhile opinions about football. Or that ordinary music-lovers can't have sensible opinions about music. Yet there's still this sniffy elitism about books.

So let's hear it for all those anonymous readers, Jo and Joanna Page-Turner, who're as entitled as anyone to proclaim the Booker Prize Winner a load of pretentious twaddle, or that well-known "literary giant" an overrated, long-winded dwarf.