Apart from the obvious (books thrown at head, rather painful that…) I don’t tend to get surprised by books. Excited, disappointed, entranced; disgusted, engrossed, bored – all of these emotions are fired by books, but surprise is not one I can really relate to.
Books tend to find their way into my hands after they’ve got a reputation. I don’t read books when they’re released (and the very few exceptions come from bankable authors: I’m currently reading “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides, on my phone (of all places), bought as soon as it arrived in the Kindle Store – knowing how much I loved “Middlesex”, and tolerated “The Virgin Suicides”, I felt this was a low-risk purchase… and I was right) as I tend to find my my mother and aunt do, and pass me the books they enjoyed.
Likewise, once the reviews have been and gone in the papers, I’ll canvass colleagues, wait a few months to see what’s being read a lot on the Tube; then I’ll buy newish books. Classics, on the other hands, I find difficult. Perhaps it’s because at school and at University I had enough time for a good few hours of reading at once – I now only seem to be able to read on the tube, which is an hour at a time. No longer can I read in bed, and so that doesn’t leave much of an evening, after a day in the office, to take the risk on a novel that isn’t already a “banker”.
Only one piece of writing, and I use that term loosely, has surprised me over the last few years, and that is Inio Asano’s graphic one-shot, “Solanin”. As a plot, it’s pretty standard – recent graduates in Tokyo find their lives dull, and resurrect their university band, while struggling to find meaning in their existence. However, it is the format that brings this to life – stunningly drawn, without a lot of the cod-pornography that manga and anime fans seem to dribble over, and a really tightly written sense of reality, it works brilliantly.
I was entranced, and I go back to it as one of my favourite books (now that I have rediscovered it in the archaeological dig that is my bedroom, having thought I’d lent it out). I can think of one other novel that somewhat surprised me, although having known in advance that it was written by IA Sealy, I suppose the only surprise was that I understood it the first time I read it! It’s called “Red: An Alphabet”, and concerns itself with a love story, surrounded by ridiculously stylised musings on the alphabet and Matisse. A good book, but most definitely not one for the suitcase, to read by the pool.
I suppose what “surprised” me about both of these books was their form, not their content. Asano, writing (and drawing) in a medium I’m not used to, hasn’t converted me to graphic novels – although I’d like to pick up Satrapi’s “Persepolis” (having seen the film), and I have bought “Maus”: perhaps these are exceptions in a genre filled, at least to my untrained eye, with a load of teenage boy aimed claptrap – and Sealy, whilst following on from Joyce (there’s a lot more to come from me in this meme about Joyce) in using different forms and structures to frame a novel engaged me more with these forms and structures than with anything he’d plotted. Even now, I can only remember a few scenes, the overall syllabary concept and an obsession with Matisse. Nothing of the plot remains.
