Why Am I Reading This?

My darling Zuni, my beautiful dog, died on Wednesday. I'm not going to go into it because I'm gutted. But the whole thing has brought back to me how much I rely on fiction. Medicine is amazing, wonderful, but when it can no longer help, fiction has always been a vital source of comfort.

I think it is good to have books of different kinds - books that stretch your mind, and books that comfort you. Sometimes a book ends up doing both those things. Many books do neither. I follow Alom Shaha on Twitter and a while back he said that he'd been so disappointed in so many books that he felt like he'd somehow lost the ability to enjoy novels. Various replies sympathized; one woman said that she tended to re-read old favourites just to feel what it was to love books again. It was a good thread to find, because I have been feeling this way and wondering what's wrong with me.

I know that there are good books out there. But, like Mr Shaha and the others, I keep finding myself a quarter of the way through a promising-looking novel, wondering where the joy is. I keep reading books that have no heart. Books that have a kind of bleakness to them, in which I feel like the writer is saying, We will not be lowering ourselves to the level of enjoyment. We are too sophisticated for that. I like a good plot, well-constructed, ingenious. Imagine a cat's cradle, taut. Instead plots are loose and sagging - but only Philistines hanker after plot. Characters are hollow and behave in nihilistic ways that human beings almost never do.

I can't help but suspect a kind of selfishness and egotism on the part of the writer when I read a book like this. The past week or two I had been reading Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. I hadn't read any of his other books and my husband bought me this one partly because it was a sort of detective novel, and a good whodunit is something I relish. This is not a good whodunit - there is no ingenious plot, there are no clues or satisfying tying together of strands. Like several other reviewers on Goodreads, I assumed at some point the events would turn out to be a dream, because it made very little sense. The 'plot twist' when it happens involves, as so often is the case, the rape of a woman. It ends on a flat note and is the kind of book that would leave me depressed even on a normal day.

Yesterday was not a normal day. Ishiguro owes me nothing, of course, and the idea that books should avoid disturbing themes or scenes is a terrible one. I have no wish to wrap my mind in cotton wool. I've read books that have included very dark things, but I felt like they were an integral part of a story that ultimately gave me something. It's that, I think, that leaves me slightly resentful. I just find so many books ungenerous. They are caviar - not tasty, enjoyable or even nutritious, but the fact that you consume them tells you and others that you are the right sort of person.