Opinion Literarily speaking

But what if you wanted to be slightly more obscure? What if, on hearing the 15-minute-long recitation of a mutual friend’s catastrophe-upon-catastrophe-upon-catastrophe, you wanted to gush to your narrator friend, “Without feathers! Without feathers!” If the friend is a Woody Allen fan, she may recognise the phrase as Allen’s play on Emily Dickinson’s line, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

Otherwise, she is likely to be baffled. Thus, it is thoughtful, when making a similarly recherché comment, to pimp the original source. One way of doing this is more polite than others: If, instead of asking, “Have you read much Emily Dickinson?” or “Do you know the Emily Dickinson line about…?” you simply say, “There’s that Emily Dickinson line about… “ you will flatter your interlocutor. And isn’t that partly why you’re friends in the first place?

As with food and clothing, [books are] a commodity that elicits status anxiety for many people, particularly the insecure. And wherever there is status anxiety, there are potential minefields. We need to tread with the lightness of meringue.

Let’s look first at what other people sitting on the train are reading. If, like me, you devote an unhealthy amount of time to bookspotting, then you, too, probably view the advent of the e-reader with mild irritation. It makes our job so much harder. Sure, if the enKindled is sitting right next to us, it’s easy enough to get a quick surreptitious look. But what of the more physically remote? How to include him in our census?

Find a distinguishing feature in the environs, or an obstruction on the landscape, and then stand or crouch such that the e-reader is now between you and said feature or obstruction. Craning your head forward in a gesture of exaggerated curiosity, your cheeks acting as satellite dishes to the feature or obstruction, briefly flit your eyes downwards at the e-reader. (The Hunger Games. Just as you suspected.) Should the graceful enactment of this manoeuvre prove too burdensome, I suggest you find a new medium through which silently to judge others, such as footwear or nape hair.

On ascertaining the title of the book that another person is reading, the thoughtful individual should avoid blurted reactions that betray either snobbishness or insecurity. The response “A little light reading, eh?” made upon seeing a copy of Valley of the Dolls is not particularly endearing; better to stick with “Fun!” or any comment related to Helen Lawson’s wig being flung into a toilet.

Additionally, giving voice to spoilers is, of course, bad manners incarnate — that is, your friend who sees you reading Presumed Innocent and announces, “The wife did it.” Blammo — dead. The friend, I mean. When you recommend or give a book to a friend, it’s best if this act is fuelled by your genuine belief that the friend will love the book, rather than by the fact that you loved the book, or the observation that everyone else in the country loves the book so why shouldn’t your friend love it, too? If the first circumstance is your motivator, I would introduce you to the phrase “gift certificate”. If the second circumstance is your motivator, I lead you towards the word “blog”.

Unsolicited books should be given free of any air of obligation or expectation. The best sales pitch I ever got for a loaner was the friend who handed me Fight Club and said: “You might love this or you might hate it. My ego is not involved. Explore without constraints.” The worst pitch I ever got came from the friend who wanted to “fill in the gaps” of my history-related ignorance with a learned volume whose title my memory has subsequently left on the side of a hill to die.

Alford is the author, most recently, of ‘Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?’
The New York Times