Reading for Other People

Hello, thank you for reading Hot Girl Library! This newsletter is just me, a hot girl (debatable), talking about books. If you like it, let me know! If you don’t, please keep it to yourself. I’m fragile. 💔

Up until recently, I worked as a bookseller. To be more specific, I was both bookseller and “book curator” – a job I didn’t know existed before I had it and should have been more modestly classified as “book buyer”. The job description was a dream. I had free rein over the bookstore’s offerings and spent most of my time at work reading (about reading) and talking about books. 

After a few months into the job, it became quite easy to match customers to books. Every time I read a book – or its blurb – I immediately tried to imagine its ideal reader. I spent a lot of time talking to customers and constructed several “types” of readers in my head. Some readers cared more about form than content. They loved a well-constructed sentence and dense descriptions. Novels didn’t have to tell grand stories in order to hold their attention. Other readers were more plot-oriented and wanted to read about lives and histories outside of their own. They enjoyed books set in foreign countries and #ownvoices narratives. There were readers who read to feel represented, readers who read to be educated, and readers who read to join conversations. None of these categories were fixed. We didn’t have an algorithm to match people to books, it was an intuitive process. I loved spending hours on the shop floor talking to customers and figuring out what they’d enjoy next.

In the last few months of my tenure, the bookstore started a subscription service: every customer who signed up would receive the same book. Selecting a title for an invisible customer felt much harder. I could no longer ask the questions that I’d come to rely on: What did you read last? What are your favourite books? What are you in the mood for today? Instead, I constructed a generic persona for the bookstore customer. Working at a niche bookstore made it a bit easier. The customers were self-selecting and were generally interested in books from marginalised voices with a liberal-leaning political slant. But books are so much more than a series of content tags. As I screened potential books, I asked myself how customers would respond to unlikeable characters, experimental structures, or any numbers of features that are unlikely to be found on bestseller lists in Singapore. I needed to pick titles that would appeal to the most customers possible. It was frustrating navigating the tension between picking books with “mass appeal” (by my estimation) and books that I thought would be polarising but worth the read. I’m not sure how well I did actually. We didn’t receive much customer feedback about titles, positive or negative, so it’s impossible to know if my picks worked. I ended up taking the gamble on the polarising books anyway. Here are two titles that made the cut:

little scratch by Rebecca Watson

I hesitated here because this book probably looks quite intimidating if you’re used to reading conventional novels. If I recall correctly, my boss wasn’t too keen on it because she thought it was poetry, which she didn’t enjoy. It’s not. It’s a novel that plays with form. This book is brilliant!! I’m a bit mad that I didn’t think of something like this first… but I wouldn’t have written it this well so my envy is misplaced. The reader follows the internal monologue of an unnamed narrator as she goes through her day. The prose is staccato and effervescent. Your eyes dance across the page to keep up. The protagonist has a sparkling sense of humour. It helps her cope with the traumatic memories that she skirts around and introduces a strained levity to the text. I still laughed several times. It takes incredible skill to write about such harrowing subject matter and pull it off with a light touch.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

I don’t feel qualified to comment on this book after Grace Lavery wrote the perfect review here. Don’t read the review if you’re spoiler-conscious. Here’s a quote from Peters in her Vulture profile that really sums up my experience of the book: “We’re coming to a stage of trans literature where cis people come to know themselves through a trans lens,” You will have to read the profile (and book, of course!!) to understand that quote in context. 😊

Something I read recently

Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

This is a collection of short stories about contemporary China that skilfully captures the way an individual can be dwarfed and alienated by society. What I really appreciated was how kind the book’s perspective was. A lot of its characters are misfits or the left behind and each of their stories is told with compassion. You can read the first story in the collection here and an interview with Chen here in the same issue of The New Yorker. The interview is great because she’s really thoughtful about the decisions she made in the story.

Reading about reading

The Cost of Reading by Ayşegül Savaş

Ayşegül Savaş contemplates the way women’s and men’s time is valued and the uneven burden taken by women writers in literary citizenship. She starts with Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living which is a book I highly recommend. In fact, I recommend anything written by Levy. Some of her covers are quite ugly. Just read the ebooks.

One non-book thing

Hey! Have a picture of Phoebe, the original hot girl.

Thanks for joining me! I love books. Please let me know if I put too many things in this newsletter. I promise to keep these emails under 1000 words every time x