Snap Decisions when Buying Books

I’ve mentioned before how I often put books through a 15-page in-store trial before deciding to buy them. What I didn’t mention is, sometimes the author wows me so much with a certain turn of phrase early on in the book that I’ll end the trial well before the 15 pages are up. Sometimes I’m seduced despite myself. Take, for example, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The story didn’t sound particularly appealing to me—it was marketed as a dysfunctional family saga, and I don’t usually go for family sagas, dysfunctional or not. But browsing one day in the bookstore, I picked it up on a whim and started reading. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d accidentally skipped the prologue and dived straight into the first chapter, where I read this sentence:

Down the long concourse they came unsteadily, Enid favoring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the aiport carpeting with poorly-controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time.

I decided on the spot to get the book. That first sentence created such a wonderfully vivid mental picture, I figured if the rest of the book was even half as good, I’d love it. (I did. One of the best damn books ever.)

Similarly, when I was grocery shopping yesterday, I noticed that Patricia Gaffney’s The Goodbye Summer was out in paperback. I love Gaffney; I don’t love women’s fiction. I mean, it’s all right and all, but… I don’t know. I think it’s my prejudice against anything remotely heartwarming, and yeah, I know how odd that sounds coming from someone who reads a lot of romance novels. But I told myself, it’s Gaffney, I need to at least check it out, so I set my shopping basket down and picked it up.

The kicker for this book didn’t arrive until page 2, when Gaffney describes the heroine’s grandmother:

Nana had long, pretty, smoke-gray hair and, before it softened with age, a long, bony, sharp-featured face. She loved it when people told her she looked like Virginia Woolf. Nobody ever added, “If she’d lived to seventy-nine instead of walking into the river.”

Not only was that passage funny, it provided me with a clear image of Nana, and also a wonderful little glimpse into her personality. Gaffney still has the magic. So I came home with a new paperback about heartwarming lessons in love and loss, the kind of story that would normally make me break out in hives just thinking about,  unless there was also the promise of loads and loads of loin-warming boinking involved (who needs antihistamines when one has sweet, sweet smut?).

I also effectively broke my resolution not to buy any new books until I exercised at least 120 minutes a week for 4 weeks straight. So Pat: if I become a lardass (or more of a lardass than I am already), I’d like you to know that it’s all your fault.