Easy reading, hard reviewing

The easiest books to read are not necessarily the easiest books to write about, or so I've found in my decades of writing reviews.

Take mysteries and thrillers, for example. Books that are described as "hard to put down" usually fit into one of these categories. Yet it can be difficult to find much to say about such books after you read them. You can write only so much about the plot without giving too much away. What you can say can usually be put into a paragraph or two. Then what? Even book clubs usually avoid such books because there is so little to talk about, especially if not everyone has finished reading the book.

Have you noticed that magazine and newspaper columns that focus on murder mysteries usually cover several books at once? I know this is what I usually did when I wrote a newspaper book review column. The reason for this is not just that mysteries make fast reading but that devoting an entire column to just one book can be a challenge. Sometimes it can be done, but rarely is it easy.

Children's books are also easy to read but a challenge to review. Short story collections, on the other hand, can often be difficult to read while also difficult to write about. There are a number of different stories, each with different characters, and a reader must start fresh with each one. A book with 12 stories means starting over 12 times. The reviewer, too, has a number of different stories with different characters to deal with. Wrapping everything into an interesting review can be very difficult unless the reviewer can find some common thread in the stories on which to focus the review. Reviewing the Tom Hanks collection of stories Uncommon Type was made easier by the fact that a typewriter is featured in each story, even though the stories themselves are quite different.

Literary novels can sometimes be a challenge to read, yet writing about them can often be a snap. You can say more about the plot, for one thing. Sometimes you can even give away the ending, for knowing the ending doesn't keep anyone from reading Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn. More importantly, literary novels have themes, which don't even have to be the themes the authors had in mind when they wrote the books. Readers can find their own meaning in a novel of this sort, giving the writer something to write about  — and book clubs something to talk about. Sometimes I just find a quote from the novel and build my review from that.

The easiest books to write about may be biographies and histories. The subject matter is all fair game for the reviewer, plus there is the particular slant taken by the author that is open for comment. Yet these books can be long and difficult to plow through.