How to buy a love of reading
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Fall in love with reading all over again.To Carley Wells, words are the enemy. Her tutors innumerable SAT flashcards. Her personal trainers fifty-seven pounds overweight assessment. And the endless reading assignments from her English teacher, Mr. Nagel. When Nagel reports to her parents that she has answered What is your favorite book with Never met one I liked, they decide to fix what he calls her intellectual impoverishment. They will commission a book to be written just for herone shell have to lovethat will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their familys devotion to the arts. They will be patrons the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter The Love Of Reading.Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine loving books, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carleys best friend and Fox Glens resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her lately as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.When the Wellses move writer Bree McEnroyauthor of a failed meta-novel about Odysseus failed journey home through the Internetinto their mansion to write Carleys book, Carleys sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter from drinking and give them something to share. But as Hunters behavior becomes erratic and dangerous, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the fictional world Bree has created, and begins to understand for the first time the power of storiesthose we read, those we want to believe in, and most of all, those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Stories powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.
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I was concerned about two possible outcomes when I first read the cover flap to How to Buy a Love of Reading: the first that the book would be overwrought with literary devices, self-referential and self-deferential – obsessed with its own cleverness, the second that as a “young adult” book, the writing would be so simplistic, so easy to read, that it would not be worth my time.
Gibson walks a narrow line without ever venturing into either extreme in this novel, which is filled with a rich and moving narrative, well-depicted and sympathetic characters and metafictional devices, theme, tone and point-of-view. It is not only the sort of book that one can read many times to find out what it is “really about” (and certainly, because it is the sort of book that makes one hark back to their own exposure to the concept of literature as more than narrative, I was tempted midway through to sit down and write a 5 paragraph essay about the Dark Journey and Coming of Age imagery.) but also the sort of book wherein “stuff happens” and the reader cares about what will happen.
The writing is elegant, readable, funny and terribly, terribly sad. It is easy to identify with parts of each of the (many) characters, while despising others. Ultimately, it is a book about narrative, as each of the main characters has a different struggle with living their own narrative – Hunter who lives his life according to his own internal narration, Carley, who rewrites her life in Aftermemory, Bree who is so self-conscious and defensive that she invents literary devices in her life and Justin, who does not live at all, rather inventing the story of his life to be printed in the papers.
