In Search of a Good Read

Goodreads the platform, has a very evocative name. No matter how much you read or how many books you have in your digital or home library, there comes a time when you are searching for the next book that will make you feel alive, involved, entertained and other such tall orders.

So, Goodreads works on recommendations based on the books you have been reading or the books people in your network or those with similar tastes are reading. However, even these are not enough at times.

And so begins the quest to read beyond your normal preferences. I picked one such book recently, from a platform I rarely visit, published by small, indie publisher with a tacky name meant to obfuscate rather than enlighten. The collection of stories seemed wanting, as did the cover. The blurb had extracts from the stories, as if someone did not want to spend time writing them afresh.

The text, sigh, was rife with exclamation marks as if the reader could not understand what was being written. There were ellipses, is that even the way each sentence should end?

There was no reason the stories were clubbed together. I prefer reading anthologies that have atleast a thread of theme running through the collection or some logic that defends them being put in a book.

This post is a rant, I know, and from talking about finding a good book to read I am discussing why a book did not work. But here’s the understanding I have arrived at: just because we can now put together any content, choose any cover, package and publish it as a book, whether it is 10 pages or 100, does not mean we go ahead with work that does not fulfil the bare minimum obligations of it being good work.

‘Do it right and well, even if there are no gatekeepers.’

This post is part of BlogchatterA2Z.

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