By John Eklund

I’ve been drunk on books for most of my life. From the early days when I opted for the library over the playground, to 13 years as a bookseller, to my current job as a book rep, it sometimes seems as if books are all I’ve truly cared about. A 10-year jail sentence with books versus a five-year sentence without? No contest. I read slowly and I know people who consume many more books than I do, but since I get through 50 or 60 a year, I’m probably in the top 1 percent. The U.S. bar is set pretty low.

I spend lots of time listening to my colleagues lament the state of the book industry. Book people have always been a little fearful, and why not? Four percent of the population visits bookstores with any regularity. Five thousand copies is considered a big print run for an important nonfiction book. National Book Award winners sell a mere 2,000 copies. Fewer and fewer cities are able to sustain good independent stores, while once-great university bookstores have become sweatshirt boutiques. Though publishing continues to have some cache as an appealing vocation, very few sane youngsters long for a career as a bookseller. And the general anti-intellectual jihad emanating from Washington and the neocon think tanks casts a long and depressing shadow.

The bulk of the promotional resources in the publishing industry are directed toward getting a shrinking array of mainstream titles on bestseller lists. These books, which typically have a shelf-life of six months, are obsessively focused on while the vast majority of published books are left to chance. An end of the year “Dear Colleague” letter sent out by Peter Olson, CEO of Random House, measured the firm’s successes for the year almost exclusively in terms of bestseller lists. (“Ever-greater consumer selectivity” was cited as something to be overcome)

There are some really smart people in the book business, which is why it’s such a mystery that so little is known about the basics, such as why anybody buys a book. Wal-Mart can predict with great specificity that hurricanes in Florida will mean increased demand for batteries and flashlights, but also, based on past correlations, beer and pop-tarts. (Beer, understood, but pop-tarts? Don’t they need toasters for that? Wouldn’t the electricity be out?)

The book business has nowhere near this forecasting expertise. Instead, there’s a somewhat desperate reliance on the few things that are known with confidence, such as an author’s past track record, or perceived truisms like the idea that mass market fiction sells better in summer. When I present books to buyers for their consideration, the most persuasive thing I can do is to offer up a comparison book: “This book X is a lot like that book Y. It will have the same sales pattern and you should order it.” The problem is, these comparisons are notoriously unreliable. No book is truly like any other. And despite informed give and take over the prospects of a title, it often comes down to intangibles and guesswork. As my friend Arsen at Boulder Bookstore once remarked, “I just can’t picture anyone bringing this up to the cash register.”

The fact is, nobody knows why anybody buys a given book at a given moment. What makes me select the four or five books a month I finish? First, I read a couple titles each season from the new releases I have to sell. Then, there is the small collection of writers whose work I worship and automatically pick up when they have something new. Currently this list includes Anita Brookner, Alan Hollinghurst, Lorrie Moore, Douglas Hofstadter, and a few others. Then there are the dead favorites, to whom I return from time to time: Flannery O’Connor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, W.G. Sebald, Halldor Laxness, Henry Green.

That leaves lots of slots for random, serendipitous book discoveries. But how to discover a book? I’m not moved by advertising, though I’m obsessive about reading reviews. (The recent Jonathan Franzen piece on the Alice Munro short story collection in the Times Book Review had me desperate to own a copy.) When a book makes a best-seller list it is instantly less interesting to me. Though I love talking with booksellers and friends about what they are reading, I rarely read a book because someone recommends it, preferring the illusion that books are somehow my personal discovery. (Hypocritically, I badger people constantly when I love a book.) Book clubs are loathsome.To spend an evening with an earnest group of amateurs in a structured discussion about a novel I’ve been assigned to read strikes me as a waste of good reading time.

Marketing considerations have eclipsed editorial at many publishing houses, and now we have creeping marketism at the retail level. Though good booksellers have always paid attention to what their customers buy and followed up with appropriate suggestions, the internet retailers have taken this friendly practice to diabolical extremes. When I consider purchasing a book online, I’m supplied by a shopping algorithm with a list of what else I might like, based on what I have bought or what other people “like me” bought. (This isn’t unique to bookselling- Netflix compulsively pushes DVD’s I “might also enjoy,” and online music purveyors are full of cross-references of this sort). According to Wired magazine, “offbeat content” is now driving internet book and music niche sales, so I suppose we can look forward to ever more refined attempts to co-opt every last shred of the authentically offbeat, while our commodified selves are reflected back at us ever more precisely. My heart sinks when I see that a publisher has defaced a book jacket with a “Great for Book Clubs” stamp, and included a list of stupid discussion questions at the back. How long before we see the phrase “Offbeat Content” stamped on the jacket of some hip trade paperback?

What’s my problem? Sometimes these suggestions are canny and useful, and they can always just be ignored. But I’m tired of being marketed to, and by tired I do mean physically exhausted. Since the day I noticed a rack of “pre-faded” jeans at the Gap in 1988, authenticity has been under siege in every corner of the world. Books have always seemed like a safe refuge, but no longer. My purchase decisions can now be fed back to me, creating a little cyber biblio-me. I’m profiled! Worse, my book selections are cycled back into the great profiling machine so other people (“like me!”) can have their reading choices directed by mine – whether I consent to this or not.

Overreaction? Probably. Books are commodities even though we like to think of them as having an inner realness that transcends their market value. And cultural commodification is common to music and art as well. We all hate to see what we love tainted by filthy commerce. Does the deli owner agonize over the inner cheesiness of his provolone? I hope so. But no matter how beloved and fetishized, a product is for sale. Like intellectual property owners who fret that the impulse to create will disappear if the open source movement is successful, some worry that if there is to be no marketing of books, no creation of a felt need to read, people might stop buying. I surely don’t have an answer.

I don’t really have a problem with small-scale targeted book marketing. If I’ve bought six volumes of Irish poetry over the past year, and my local bookshop has been clever enough to quietly track these purchases, is it really such an imposition to receive a postcard alerting me to a new Seamus Heany collection? But the “customer-recommends” algorithm removes the pesky human from the interaction. And it does the exact opposite of what it claims to do: far from expanding my reading horizon, it contracts it. It doesn’t show me new worlds, it tries to duplicate as closely as possible the reading world I’m stuck in. When I’m offered “more like this” I want to scream NO! Not more like that. More like something else entirely, more like some other reader I’m nothing like, more like some new and different experience.

Buried in the seemingly individualized taste-targeting is the potential for an insidious flattening of content. Left to calculate away ad infinitum, wouldn’t all the algorithms eventually arrive at a homogenized prototype in each book category?

Several years ago, the brilliant art provocateurs Komar & Melamid published a book called Painting by Numbers: Komar & Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. In it they tried to identify the components of the most popular possible painting. Cheerily democratic, they systematically surveyed the public, country by country, as to art appreciation preferences: Color? People? Animals? Which? How many? Doing what? In the end, they created paintings to these populist specifications, and the deeply fascinating results, which varied greatly from culture to culture, were uniformly, unsurprisingly, grotesque.

I’d love to see a similar project on the perfect book. Plot, characters, setting, length, ending- every element could be determined by popular vote, followed presumably by guaranteed mass sales. (“If only…” some of the major publishers seem to dream.)

Perfect book? Here’s an alternative idea: In 1918, when he was a university student, the writer Christopher Isherwood described his plans for the perfect novel, and eerily anticipated elements of contemporary cyber texts:

“…the book was to be illustrated with real oil paintings, brasses, carvings in ivory or wood; fireworks would explode to emphasize important points in the narrative; a tiny gramophone sewn into the cover would accompany the descriptive passages with emotional airs; all the dialog would be actually spoken; the different pages would smell appropriately, according to their subject matter, of grave-clothes, manure, delicious food, burning hair, chloroform, or expensive scent. All copies would be distributed free. Our friends would find, attached to the last page, a pocket containing bank notes and jewels; our enemies, on reaching the end of the book, would be shot dead with a revolver concealed in the binding.”

One of the most profound, accomplished, and moving novels I read all year was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. What first drew me to the book was the physical object, a seductively designed trade paperback with French flaps (tragically dropped by the publisher in subsequent reprints). As I held it in my hands and read the blurbs and jacket copy – the physical qualities may be reason number one to buy a book, a factor unavailable online – I was reminded that this is the author of Number9Dream, which my friend Carl gave me three years ago. He had become enamored of an English language bookstore in Berlin, and the charming woman who ran it, and “had to buy something.” I tried to read it (while I’m resistant to recommendations, the sense of obligation kicks in when people actually give me a book), but I put it aside after 50 pages; it was too complicated, or I was too thick.

Cloud Atlas, however, is something else. Though it has the surface look of a possibly annoying post-modern exercise – six separate narratives in six distinct styles and voices, spanning four hundred years, zipping ahead to the frightening future and then swooping back past our time – It was mesmerizing from beginning to end. It’s really hard to believe an achievement like this, and the idea that 2004 was not a good year for novels is refuted by this amazement alone.

When I was asked recently to name my favorite backlist (i.e. not new) book from one of the presses I represent, I immediately thought of Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Though I had recommended this book to anyone who would listen when it was published in 2001, I’d never actually read it until last month. Luckily, my intuitive sense of it was right – it’s utterly absorbing and packed with surprises: how 19th century working stiffs, contrary to the stereotype that intellectual inquiry was the sole province of elites, created their own book culture, often out of nothing; how the Bible was the first autodidactic text; how reading was tied to the origins of the idea of dissent; how Scottish weavers managed to read at the loom; how shepherds created informal, circulating libraries by leaving books for each other in stone walls; how, before mass literacy, a group of workers would appoint someone to read aloud while the others shared his work; how the early East End cinema was interactive – “only the screen was silent!”; how Welsh miners set up libraries; how 19th century working class reading tastes were always slightly behind the times because their books were only affordable once they reached the second-hand stalls; how private reading and instruction were considered suspicious, unneighborly, selfish. All this entertainment, in one paperback!

Though it’s a genre I normally don’t go near, one of the best books I’ve read all year was a Japanese thriller called Out, by Natsuo Kirino. She’s written 40 novels but this is her first book in English, which alone is cause for curiosity. The book is a harrowing visit to the world of a group of young women working third shift in a fast food factory- ordinary people who become enmeshed in a creepy crime that perfectly mirrors the dehumanizing late capitalist working world. It’s written in a fast-paced noir vein and rips along in a deeply satisfying way. Here’s the thing: though I did read a Henning Mankell last year, neither my neighborhood bookseller nor a sophisticated algorithm would be likely to detect the slightest interest on my part in a book like this. But in a coffee shop in Chicago I overheard someone describing it so powerfully that I had no choice but to ask what it was and to seek out a copy. While direct recommendations rarely work on me, the merest fragments of overheard book chat seem authentic, and therefore persuasive. But beware, buzz agentry has gotten so refined it’s no longer certain that overheard conversations about products aren’t staged.

While cleaning out some bookshelves recently, I came across a paperback called Asylum and Other Stories, by the Irish writer Aidan Higgins. I remember buying this book at a used store in Montreal ten years ago, but I never read it, and had forgotten about it. I sometimes buy a book because I so love the store I’m in and I can’t leave without one book as souvenir. But, strangely, that very afternoon – coincidences real or imagined are powerful inducements to reading – I noticed a review by John Banville of Higgins’ masterpiece Langrishe, Go Down, a book I’d neither read nor heard of, just released by Dalkey Archive (a press that, along with Green Integer, City Lights, New Directions, New York Review of Books and a few others, has redefined the concept of “new book”.) I bought it, read it over a weekend, loved it, and now, a decade later, I’ll start on Asylum.

I just finished what is certainly my book of the year, The Society of Others by William Nicholson. Beginning in the seventies, while working for the BBC, he wrote eight novels, of which only one ever got published, and “it was ghastly,” says Nicholson. He went on to write screenplays for stage, screen and television, receiving Oscar nominations for Shadowlands and Gladiator. Then, a couple years ago, he suddenly produced a prize-winning trilogy of children’s books called Wind on Fire, and this year, finally, out of nowhere, this novel at age 56.

The Society of Others is a darkly hilarious short book of deep philosophical reflection narrated by a disaffected teenager who sets off on a life journey that blows up in his face. He finds himself in a vaguely eastern European dictatorship, caught up in an ambiguous resistance movement. He’s not sure which side he’s on and he’s compelled to take steps he doesn’t understand. It’s like some other books (the Magnus Mills novels come to mind) but it’s also unlike any of them. “It was tempting,” Nicholson said in an interview with the Independent, “to think, What do readers want? How can I be like that other book that was successful? But I’m kind of past that now.” He has written something so haunting, so deeply original, it’s really all I’ve been able to think about for the past couple weeks.

How did I stumble on this book? Strangely enough, given that I’ve just spent many paragraphs trashing book marketing, it was recommended to me by my friend Ruth. More than recommended: Ruth is a full time professional buzz artist repping high-end literary fiction for a major publisher to high-end literary booksellers. When I ran into her at a book show in Minneapolis, she was beating the Nicholson drum, and insisted that I accept a galley. Because she has great taste and is not a computer algorithm, I suspended my hostility to being marketed long enough to give it a look. Which proves that no source should really be ruled out in the search for satisfying reading.

We are awash in great books, more than we could possibly read. I have to laugh when I hear people bemoan a lack of quality, or say things like “What a lousy season for fiction.” To access the literary wealth we have to step outside the paradigm of the Corporate New, where we are marketing targets, and instead create for ourselves a Personal New, a truly custom-designed inventory of the found, the overheard, the stumbled-upon and the forgotten. Superb books are plentiful in every bookstore and library. While the commercial publishing conglomerates chase the next mega-selling piece of fundamentalist pornography, literary treasures and surprises await those with open eyes and ears.

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