Reading in Public No. 31: What does it mean for a book to "work"?
Unpacking my current book review pet peeve
A couple months ago I went on Instagram stories to express my frustration with book reviewers using the phrase “this book didn’t work for me.” I got a lot of push back on my thoughts, but the more I sit with it, the more this phrase has become a major bookish pet peeve of mine. I decided to unpack and explain my thinking more here, not to convince anyone else that they can’t use this phrase, but because I think it gets at some bigger questions around how we frame bookish discourse.
First, I need to acknowledge that I completely understand why readers and reviewers are inclined to use this phrase. I’ve used it many times myself! We use it as a euphemism for I didn’t like it, or I didn’t get it, or I didn’t think it was very good. I totally get that. We want to be nice! We want to assure other readers that they may still like the book even if we didn’t. We want to be generous readers who understand that even if a book wasn’t right for us, there are many other readers out there who may love and adore it. And maybe, (and I’m calling myself out here), we just get squeamish about saying, “I didn’t like this.”
But I also believe words matter, and I think “this book didn’t work for me” is both a harsher critique of the book than “I didn’t like it” and lacking in the level of self-awareness I want to see in book reviews. So let’s break this down…
What does it mean for a book to “work”?
I would argue that when a book “works,” it’s achieving what it set out to do. It’s that simple…and that complicated. It’s complicated because it can sometimes be difficult to discern a book’s intentions, but I think exploring this question is crucial to reviewing any artistic endeavor. I want to know whether the reviewer liked or didn’t like the book, but I also need to know what they think the book was doing and whether or not it was successful. To trust a book review, I have to know that the reviewer at least attempted to understand the book on its own terms.
So how do we know what a book is trying to do? Like I used to tell my students, there’s never one right answer to this question (although there are probably wrong answers). The most straightforward way I know to get at a book’s thematic purpose is to consider the major topics or big ideas a book is dealing with and then answering the questions, “What is the book saying about that topic?” A topic of book, for example, might be social class. But the theme is what it’s saying about social class1.
For me, then, a book “works” when it effectively explores its themes. Not in a “this is the thesis of my novel” kind of way, but rather in a nuanced, inquisitive manner. The books that do this the best—in my opinion—make readers confront these themes both intellectually and emotionally. Extra bonus points from me if the prose and structure also contribute to enhancing the themes.
My book club recently read The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, a book told through the perspective of a man in the throes of Alzheimers. During our discussion, we considered the idea that the book’s purpose is to demonstrate how unreliable memory is and to give the reader insight into what it feels like to live with severe memory loss. In this way, the book worked, but not all of us liked it. These are the times when I think the language we use to talk about books really matters. There’s a big difference between a book not achieving what it set out to do and a book not being an enjoyable reading experience or suited to our taste.
Long story short, when I ask myself if a book is working, I’m asking if the book has effectively developed its thematic aims. The answer to this questions is absolutely subjective, but I do think it helps readers and reviewers get on the same page outside the realm of personal taste.
What I hear when I read “this book didn’t work for me.”
Here’s what I want this to mean: the reviewer understands what the book is trying to do, but—based on the understanding and experience of said reader—it didn’t achieve its aims.
But, too often, reviews that use this phrase really mean they didn’t like the book, and don’t include any evaluation of what the book was trying to do. These reviews are often based on where the book failed to meet expectations. And this really bothers me! I think it does a disservice to the books when we say they don’t work and, really, we just didn’t enjoy them. It does a disservice to books when we don’t evaluate them for what they are rather than for what we want them to be. There’s still plenty of room to dislike a book! Even one that’s very successfully achieving its aims. And if the book truly didn’t work, tell me more! I desperately want to know where and how it failed. This is the good stuff in literary criticism!!
So my very personal request (that likely no one else cares about) is this: If you didn’t like a book, please just say that! Don’t dance around taste by putting the onus on the book itself. I do get it…I have always been hesitant to say I didn’t like something, but I’m coming to realize how valuable that is both for myself and for my reviews. Let’s give ourselves and each other room to simply not like things without hiding behind euphemisms that mean something else entirely.
Tell me your thoughts! Do you differentiate between a book “working” and liking a book? What does it mean for you for a book to “work”? How do you know what a book is trying to do? And how do you feel about announcing you don’t like something?
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-Sara
Of course this question only gets at what a book is doing thematically, and books can have so many purposes beyond theme! Structural intentions, artistic intentions, emotional intentions…all of those matter too. But for myself, exploring theme is essential and is my favorite entry point into everything else a book is doing.
I think this phrase tries to signal that something isn't working on a structural or technical level; it says that the reader's failure to connect with it isn't about the prose itself, or the way the characters are drawn, or the authenticity of the voice, but rather the actual mechanics of the narrative. It seems to be interchangeable with the euphemistic "didn't hang together" people tend to use when the storyline doesn't feel satisfying.
Fascinating unpacking - thank you, Sara!. I teach creative writing, and of course this phrase crops up a lot in critiquing too: as you say, probably because it's trying to be nice, and to recognise one's own subjectivity, rather than claiming authority to decree that it's "good" or "bad" writing.
But for me the "work" in "It doesn't work for me" is more like "It doesn't work ON me": it hasn't gripped, moved, intrigued, persuaded, enraptured, enthralled me - even infuriated me, if it's that kind of book. That might be about whether it achieved its thematic aims or not, but it might just as much be about whether it got me to care whether whodunnit is revealed or not (or, indeed, to care about whodunnit at all). And whether a book works for any given reader in that sense is of course hugely subjective - not just whether I care about the theme or am bothered or irritated by a character: it can even simply be about the circumstances in which I tried to read it.
So when I'm blogging over at This Itch of Writing, or teaching or mentoring, I'm usually talking at least 50% of the time about how we set about working on our reader: how we get them to experience the story as we want them to - which of course can be a matter of anything from big narrative arcs to whether the punctuation is working as they need it to. And I think that's a legitimate position from which to review too: this book didn't fulfil its aims for this reader, for the following reasons...