There’s a particular danger when one works at a bookstore: the standard for which books are and are not worth reading becomes impossibly high, or at least, complicated. It goes something like this. For one to commit the time and energy to read a particular book, the book must:

  1. Have won a major award, or
  2. Be written by an author who has won major awards, or
  3. Be featured in the New York Times Book Review (positively is better, but even a bad review is acceptable), or
  4. Be mentioned by the publisher sales rep in a sales meeting, or
  5. Be reviewed on NPR, or
  6. Feature someone or something local, or
  7. Be positively blurbed by at least one author we have hosted, or
  8. Be compared to at least two books that we’ve enjoyed, or
  9. etc.

These rules vary somewhat from person to person, but I think on some level we* all subconsciously reject books that we might otherwise enjoy, simply because they don’t fulfill all the requisite qualifications we’ve created for our own reading habits. This is to our detriment, I believe. Yes, books should be provocative, and challenging, and even difficult sometimes. But books are for our enjoyment as well, and I’ll admit that too often I’ve skipped what looked like a “fun read” because it didn’t seem weighty or important enough. Worse yet, I’ve realized that I’m much more prone to a slump in my reading when I exclude books I know I would enjoy.

This is all a convoluted introduction to the real topic here, which is: River Monsters. It’s a book by Jeremy Wade. The subtitle reads, “True Stories of the Ones That Didn’t Get Away.” The cover photo, as you can see, features Jeremy Wade holding a giant, toothy fish that he’s presumably caught. And honestly, I was pretty much sold by this point. But what sealed the deal was when I flipped to the color photo insert in the middle and found 16 pages of Jeremy Wade holding even more giant, toothy fishes. That’s really the essence of the book – story after story from Wade’s perspective, circling the globe looking for the biggest and weirdest freshwater fish. The author bio on the back flap reveals that Jeremy Wade was a copywriter and a newspaper reporter, which tells me that, at the very least, the prose won’t be distracting (and might just be pretty good).

I don’t need a book entitled “River Monsters” to be any more complicated than that. What else can I ask of this book? Not a thing.

 

 

*I switched to the plural “we” here because it was at this point that it struck me that maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m the only one who falls prey to this bad habit, and everybody else is really quite satisfied in their book-selecting ability. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own idiosyncracies on everyone else, but so be it – I’d rather think that this post finds an audience that understands what I’m talking about than believe that I’m the only one with this issue.

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