Books That Should’ve Been Essays

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about breaking up. Specifically, how do you decide when it’s time to break up with a book? Maybe you’ve given it 10 pages or 20 or 50. Grant, you said you gave them 100, right? I tried. But you decide that it’s just not working for you. What do you do?

Well, we heard from a lot of you who said you were really relieved to hear that conversation because you felt less guilty about deciding to move on. But my favorite email came from John Benbow. John lives in San Diego, and he said he has a term for this when he breaks up with a book. He calls it post-publication editing. Isn’t that great? That’s great.

And he says that he considers post-publication editing necessary in the absence of good pre-publication editing. And he adds, many a book should have been an essay. Many an essay should have been a paragraph. Many a paragraph should have been a sentence. Isn’t that great? John, I’m with you, brother.

Me too. And you should see that sentence. Beautiful semicolons throughout. It was great. But, you know, Grant, it occurs to me that we should talk about the happier side of the romance with books. And that is specifically playing matchmaker, trying to fix somebody up with a book that we really love.

And we’ll do that a little bit later in the show, but I wonder if other folks would like to share theirs. Oh, I’d love to hear from anyone who has a book that they always recommend to everybody. What is your go-to book when you’re trying to get somebody to read? You want them to read your favorite book. What is it? Novel, a short story. How do you convince them? What is the book?

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