How to choose a good book:

Well, I have no idea how to choose a good book. Many of my friends, colleagues and so on are always telling me about the book they just couldn't face reading anymore, even though it was by their favourite author, or about their favourite period, etc. Well I am having a crisis about actually having this crisis.

This blog is about my need to widen my reading, to jump out of the 'box' and read something different and expand my horizons a little. In a way it could be described as a crazy gap year, where you buy an open ended ticket to a destination with no name and no idea how you will get there. That's how I feel when I open a book. I may know the premise, the idea behind it, but really without reading it, I don't know where I'm going to go, what I'm going to see and how I'm going to get there. Some books like to stick to their premise, so what you read on the cover or see on the cover, is pretty much it. The writing may be good, great even, but with no real surprises underneath it all. I suppose we have all read so many of these novels we might no longer be able to tell the difference, until that is, we read someting spectacular.

So, I am worried that in my search for a better reading list and wider interests and knowledge, I will face the inevitable moment where I want to chuck the book out the window and never think about it again. I actually felt this way about Great Expectations and I really did stop reading it. I don't regret it, no matter how many people tell me how amazing it is, Dickens may be a very good and sometimes great writer, but that doesn't mean every novel or idea he ever had was brilliant.

I digress, basically, I don't want to get this feeling so I have asked the friends, colleagues, and so on to suggest good books, but ones they know or think I would never have glanced at. This has created a very fruitful little pile, top of the list being Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil a true crime book that I never would have picked up, let alone made it into the section.

I'm actually excited about starting it, but first I have to finish the confusing and troublesome My Last Duchess a novel I have not quite worked out yet. I thought I would love it, the reviews, cover, blurb all sounded like lovely little piles of fluffy wonderful costume drama peaks and troughs, but instead there are weird references to tattoos and snakes and creepy love affairs. I am 260 pages in, so I refuse to judge it entirely yet, so we shall have to see. However, to fortify myself I had to open the lovely Nora Roberts Face the Fire, which is a wonderful, 'does-what-it-says-on-the-box' book.