On Books
I picked up Blink by Malcolm Gladwell last night and I haven’t put it down since. I breezed through a hundred pages in what felt like a fifteen minute page-turning spree. You could say I was bored to death then and, scanning the room to the corner where there used to sit five towering piles of books (now there’s a bloody red sofa bed instead), I decided to be resourceful and scavenged the closets for whatever I could find. In the bottom shelf of the wardrobe (which wasn’t mine, FYI) was where I found Blink amidst the books on dating and chic lit novels. It was trying its best, or so it seems, to just stand there hoping that my eyes won’t stop right on its spine. However, as we all know by now, that is exactly what lends this book it’s charm.
Blink is a wonderful read and I’m saying all this without even having finished it yet; I have other duties in life which is the only reason I hadn’t done so at one go. The pacing of the ideas was well thought out by Gladwell that it glides on smoothly as if it were my own frame of thought. His explanations are so simple and to-the-point that even when he went on to discuss algorithms and war strategies and eighteen hundred notations of twenty-five different emotions of a fifteen minute conversation between a married couple [inhale] it all still made sense up until now. I won’t try to tell you what the other ideas are because doing so would entail that I have understood and absorbed them into my head, having to explain them in my own words is a different matter entirely. What I will tell you though is how Blink is kind of how I pick up books.
Last week I had told one of our magazine’s EIC that I wanted to help their content by contributing book reviews because I saw how scarce they appeared on their issues. (Note: I flipped through almost twenty issues today and saw ONLY one book review, yes just ONE book.) But later on I wanted to take my word back, not because I’m spineless, but because I realized how little word count is required for a book review or a book blurb to be more precise. That was all they allotted for books, a tiny three by two box where a quarter of it is the book’s cover. I have no qualms about this though especially since Gladwell had said that too much information can be harmful.
Books aren’t about bestsellers and recommendations (although to some degree they are) but about experiences and relationships. I’ve seen Blink a couple of times in the bookstore but I didn’t pick it up then. Why? It didn’t feel right to me at that time but last night it spoke to me as if it was an epiphany; an intuition through association in Gladwell’s terms. I never Googled Blink even though I was curious about it simply because book reviews (the usual ones at least) are some form of “verbal overshadowing”. Gladwell illustrates this through face recall and scrambled-sentence tests; it intuitively overrides our thought process and jumps into bias, to make the idea simpler.
Therefore what I want to do in my future intuitive review of books is to not overshadow one just because there’s a Booker Prize Winner embedded on the cover. I don’t want to ever recommend a title to anyone or to myself just on the basis that I or someone enjoyed it or that it tickles the intellect. I’m sure readers are smart enough to decide for themselves if it’s a book for them or not; and being one myself, personal experiences have a huge bearing on my book habits, how I feel towards the book (after I have exhausted its pages) is dependent on how well we relate to each other. Reading becomes a two-way process then.
When I said I wanted to write book reviews I wasn’t talking about giving a summary and not giving away the plot (although I promise I won’t anyway). When I said I wanted to write book reviews, I realize now, is that I wanted to write about how I stumble upon books, how I go about reading books, how books talk to me, and – I know this looks rather conceited with all the I’s and the Me – how a book isn’t merely a published piece of writing but something more. I don’t want to talk about books only but about how it’s part of daily life and you’ve seen me do just that with Blink here. I doubt if Gladwell ever realized that Blink could ever be about the wonderful world of reading books but that’s precisely the point, books are what we make of it and I want to write about that.
