The Art & Science of Book Recommendation
By: Halima Abdullahi Achida
Recommending books to first-time readers is a skill. This is a skill even some avid readers lack. Lack of this skill makes people who have an interest in reading become discouraged after your recommendation. You make them have an unfriendly impression of reading.
I will relate some personal experiences here to help us understand how a bad choice of recommendation affects an aspiring reader, and how we can do better.
In a conversation with someone and our chat led to Europe, I talked of the many cities in Europe and he was marveled by how I knew the cities. He inquired how, obviously I am not a history/geography student, I told him I knew them from books I read. He was truly marveled -he didn’t even bother to conceal his awe.
Whenever we discussed politics, I seemed to predict correctly how events would turn out. And when they turn out the way I said they would, he’d ask me how I knew. I would tell him from books. I kept on selling the idea of reading to him.
This said person is intelligent and I knew how much books would go in a long way in amplifying his brilliance, but he was hell-bent on a faulty idea that books were made to be non-melodic lullabies. A shared belief by people who only find burying their heads in a book worthy of trial when they’re next to a bed and crave sleep. The audacity!
He would eventually give in to my persistence and accepted to start reading. I was glad it paid off.
For his first book, I enthusiastically recommended Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s critically acclaimed novel, Half Of A Yellow Sun. He came back after some days and lamented that he found the book boring and too lengthy so he had to drop it. I was suprised though, someone finding the all glamorous Half Of A Yellow Sun uninteresting?!! Unheard of.
I changed the book to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in case he had a bias for Western literature. I anticipated his feedback but got none. When I checked up on him, he shyly told me that he couldn’t read the book, he thought it was equally boring. He suggested I get him something less lengthier and more interesting than the previous two.
Guess what I recommended! I recommended the classic, Things Fall Apart and he never mentioned reading it. He must have hated it the most. He gave up on reading and I only realised later that it had do with my recommendations.
A very similar experience to my sister’s who wanted to feel the joy I derive from reading, asked me to recommend a book. I recommended the same A Thousand Splendid Suns, one of my favorite books of all time and she hated it so much she vowed to never try reading again.
My initial reactions to both scenarios were indifference. I totally absolved myself from the blame of their eventually disliking books and told myself that they read them with a closed mind. But is that really the case? Are they really at fault here? The answer is mostly no. Mostly because some people just have an unflinching dislike for literature and nothing can change that, they’re not even willing to.
Back to what I was saying on who gets the blame when a recommendation is not liked.
Sometimes what we readers do when we are asked to recommend books is impose our preferences on others. We immediately conclude that since we love those books, everyone would but that is not always the case. We fail to ask these intending readers what they’re looking for. It is like a bartender serving a customer his own favorite drink instead of what the customer prefers.
Personally, I love the long African fictions and would pick up any of Chimamanda’s titles or Chigozie Obioma’s any day and refall in love with the prose over and over again. These books are beautiful in their entirety, but would someone who loves fast-paced stories and thrilling events accord them the deserved reverence? The answer is no. Oyinkan Braithwaithe’s My Sister The Serial Killer or any of the Noir anthologies would be all this person needs to reach bookgasm.
Same applies to the first-time reader who is a hopeless romantic, and you then recommend a book that doesn’t in anyway extol love, what you’ve done is kill that desire. Get them some romance titles and you will find them wanting to read more.
Or the overtly imaginative person who wants his idea of the otherworldly massaged, and you get them a title like Americanah, how do you expect them to read and enjoy that kind of book? When they’re speculative fictions like Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata series, Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orisha, Tochi Onyebuchi’s War Girls and other SpecFis?
Reading is an art and as well a science. Recommending should be just as systematic. Pay attention to the individual asking for recommendations. Find out their philosophy of life, their mannerisms and everything else. That should guide you on the kind of books to recommend. Your preference is your preference except in cases where you both love the same thing.
As you recommend your next book, consider all these and recommend a book that will give that aspiring reader the bookgasm you have been enjoying alone. Haha.
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Halima Abdullahi Achida is a 100 level student of medical laboratory science in Usmanu Danfodio University, Sokoto. She hails from sokoto and resides in Minna.
She is an ardent reader and lover of words.
