Not Another Paperback
Some Good Light Reading
There’s that great scene in Manhattan Murder Mystery where Anjelica Huston mentions a book Woody Allen has recommended, and Diane Keaton, who plays his wife, asks why he never mentioned it to her. He pauses and says Well you don’t like light reading. Keaton, in her wonderful droll, exasperated way explodes, Since when do I not like light reading?!
There’s something that strikes some people as déclassé about the mass market paperback. Reading is supposed to be self-improving, the thinking goes, which is not going to happen with a book you finish in an afternoon. (My list of fifty books to read came out, curiously enough, one year ago today, was full of more ambitious titles, though not weighty for their own sake.)
Some paperbacks have the curious quality of being passed around. Often, if one is successful, a second quickly appears and then a third and now we have a series based on our hero (or, as often as not, our anti-hero). These books share a design theme, to make themselves instantly recognizable to their admirers. They may find themselves unceremoniously left on a shelf in a rental house, having done its job to entertain for a few hours, not worth carrying back home and deposited in a place of pride on the library.
Often perception depends on packaging. One of my favorite authors, William Boyd, was published for years by Knopf, with handsome Vintage editions (designed by Megan Wilson). In the UK, meanwhile, his work appears as £5 Penguin paperbacks, as if he was a mass favorite. The English have their light reads too—this didn’t start with sharks, Godfathers or lawyers solving crimes in Memphis.
Writers make these distinctions themselves. Graham Greene famously alternated between what he considered his serious books and detective novels. John Banville, winner of the Booker Prize, wrote detective novels under the name Benjamin Black. Were we led to think that he cared less about them or they were not as ambitious? I don’t know and I’m not sure he did either, and he dispatched with the pen name.
Where do we draw the line between an absorbing novel and a light read? Does it matter? Do we call something a genre novel to distinguish its lowbrow origins and imply that it’s a guilty pleasure? We may disagree on the titles, but we have some sense of a light read—a book that moves, doesn’t involve understanding a family tree or an obscure historical event and doesn’t possess a glacial plot.
Everybody draws their own line somewhere. Is a beach read akin to a can of Miller Lite? Enjoyable enough, pleasurable at the start and a little flat by the end? It’s a thought.
Here, in time for summer, are some light reads and nothing to feel too guilty about.
-Philip Kerr. The Bernie Gunther Series. These detective novels take place in Berlin in the buildup of WWII. They feature historical figures in the background (and sometimes the foreground) as Bernie tries to fight the good fight. You don’t have to read them in order, I enjoy The Other Side of Silence, which shifts eras and includes an appearance by Somerset Maugham. Hard to stop at just one.
