I have a running list of books I want to read in my Notes app. Recommendations come from all over: from fellow bibliophiles, from lists that get sent to me, from my book clubs. (When I told my brother recently about my pandemic-induced book club collecting habit, he didn’t miss a beat in saying, ‘Yeah, that seems right.’ [I asked him his equivalent. Apparently, it’s esoteric documentaries.])
But I digress.
When I choose a book from my TBR list, I rarely remember how it got there – or what I’m getting myself into. So it was with Jesmyn Ward’s Savage the Bones – and I’m grateful for it.
I can say nothing bad about the visceral detail Ward wields in the forging of both the physical and emotional landscape of this 2011 National Book Award winner. That said, in the first half of the slow-motion narrative, which takes the reader through barely a week of time, a chapter a day, I started to feel a strange lack of tension. Yes, our young protagonist was grappling with an unplanned pregnancy; yes, her brother’s pit bull had just given birth to a litter of puppies that seemed more important to him than his own family did. But what was the ticking time bomb? Why did this matter now?
If I had broken my rule and read anything about this book before starting it – or even chanced a skim of the back of the cover – I would have known the answer. But I didn’t. And, in the words of (the back-on-TV-wtf) Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder…
Does a book need to stand on its own, or can a writer assume the reader already knows something about what’s going to be transpiring within its pages?
I won’t spoil this book for anyone who wants to read it like I did. I will say that when the stakes were divulged – about halfway through – the importance of everything that had transpired thus far and everything that had yet to take place was magnified. Was the lack of tension, then, an error in my reading? I’m not sure.
Either way, it made me want to continue with this abnormal habit, if only to see how, without even trying, I can end up reading a book very differently from my book club peers.