The roads that lead to a market are many. It is un-African for only one road to lead to a market, no matter how small the market is. It is based on this that I want to pose a question to you my readers to find out how you choose or decide on a book to read.
The New York Times has a column it calls By The Book, in which it asks people to let its readers know how they choose what books to read. The responses have been as exciting and varying as they come and on who is answering the question. There was a particular person who was asked how he makes a decision of whether to read a book or not. His answer was revealing. Let me summarise it: he said as a matter of rule, he doesn’t read review pages or review of books. Asked why, he said some reviews are often deceitful or plain public relations. According to him, he had some years back read the review of a particular book in four or five otherwise respected international newspapers. After reading the reviews, he went online and bought the reviewed book based on the endorsement of the reviewers, who were reviewers he respected. However, on reading the book, he found out that the book was a complete hogwash, his words. Based on this, he turned his back forever on reading reviews or basing his choice of books to read on newspaper reviews.
He added that since that experience he decided to trust his own hunch or judgement to choose a book to read. What he only reads now are blurbs and that even this could be misleading. So he has decided to only buy books and perhaps read reviews in newspapers after.
It is based on this that I am asking you to let us hear from you how you make your decisions on which books to read. I have been a book reviewer for years, so I can talk or write confidently about this art. In the nineties I was a regular reviewer of books for The Guardian. It was one of the most exciting periods of my career as a journalist because I had access to books from various walks of life and authors. It was a time when the country was awash with publishing and writers, mostly not self-published, and publishers literally shipped books to newspaper houses for reviews. We were glad doing it because the book belonged to you after the review to stock your library.
However, as everything Nigerian, things have changed. I hear that reviews are today done on cash and carry basis thus leading to endorsement of books that are badly published and edited! In fact, someone recently confided in me that it was the reason he has refused to buy some of the books published at home because he believes that they may be badly edited. He added that he does not read any Nigerian author who does not have a foreign publisher or affiliation!! This was in defence of my accusation that he does not read Nigerian authors. Of course he denied this and went ahead to mention many that he had read, but when I pointed out that most of those mentioned were published abroad, was what necessitated his response.
I agree that some of these views are valid, no one labours to read a review and then buys the book and discovers it is hogwash. In the same vein, a few others confess that they avoid reading reviews because some of our reviewers think to review a book is to tell the story again in their own words thus taking the shine out of the book itself. This is why I am asking you to let me know how you decide on a book to read. Do you depend on friends’, newspapers reviews, blurbs or your hunch to buy or read a book?
Deciding to read a particular book from the millions published around the world on a daily basis can be an art in itself, don’t you think so?
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