Spectator by Seema Goswami: Some books are a closed chapter

Bestselling authors don’t always churn out page-turners. And life’s too short to endure books that are average at best

When it comes to reading, I am very much a creature of habit. I have my favourite authors who I go back to time and again and whose new releases I look forward to with keen anticipation.

David Nicholls’s recent book, You Are Here, didn’t live up to the hype.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I read that one of my favourite writers was coming out with a new book. David Nicholls (of One Day fame) was releasing a new novel, You Are Here, which had been universally well-reviewed by the critics. I faithfully downloaded it as soon as it became available on Kindle and in a state of heightened anticipation sat down to read it.

But only 15 minutes into that exercise I realised that a strange feeling was creeping over me. Could it possibly be boredom? Surely not! This was one of my favourite authors writing a book in one of my favourite genres (romance, for want of a better term). And yet I was finding it hard proceeding beyond the first few chapters. How was this possible?

Bestselling authors such as David Nicholls don’t always produce hits such as One Day.

I persisted with the book for a couple of weeks, forcing myself to read a few chapters at a time before finally deciding that life was too short to hold myself ransom to a book that really didn’t speak to me at all. So, I turned to another old favourite of mine to repair matters. Daniel Silva had just come out with the latest Gabriel Allon thriller, A Death In Cornwall, and I thought this would do the trick nicely.

So, I started the book, fingers crossed, hoping that this one would give me more joy. But no such luck. Even though all my favourite characters were in attendance and all the tropes that make an Allon thriller were present and accounted for, I found this book heavy going as well.

It was when I found myself struggling with Daniel Silva, my perennial go-to when it comes to spy thrillers, that an alarm went off in my head. What exactly was the problem here? Was it the book (or books)? Or was it me? What accounted for the fact that I simply wasn’t enjoying reading the authors that I had always sworn by?

A Death in Cornwall wasn’t as interesting as Daniel Silva’s earlier books.

Could it be that my attention span had been destroyed by too much social media? Had scrolling through Twitter rewired my brain in such a way that I no longer appreciated writing that was longer than byte-sized? Had the Internet finally fried my head so badly that I could not immerse myself in reading, one of the great joys of my life?

You may laugh, but I was so perturbed by this state of affairs that I decided I had to investigate deeper. And what better way to do that than to go back to the books that had introduced me to these writers and made me a life-long fan. So I duly dug out my well-thumbed copy of One Day and, much to my joy, managed to get through it in a couple of days, enjoying every second. Then, it was time to delve into Silva’s first book in the Allon Series, The Kill Artist, to check if the magic still worked — and yes, it did.

So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t me, after all. It was the books. And I can’t tell you what a relief that realisation was!

From HT Brunch, September 21, 2024

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