What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

New York: Tor Books, 2013; $26.99 hc; 446 pages

A few years ago Jo Walton published Among Others, a Hugo– and Nebula–award-winning novel about (among other things) the love of books, and especially sf/f books.

Walton also writes blog posts for Tor.com about (among other things) the books she loves and why she loves them. What Makes This Book So Great is a collection of posts from that blog.

Roland Barthes famously said that those who never reread are condemned to always read the same book. Walton is a voracious rereader who says that she doesn’t feel she’s finished a book after a single reading. Her blog is about the books she rereads. It is all about (to stay with Barthes here for a minute) le plaisir du texte, the pleasure of the text—specifically, the pleasure of coming back to visit with old friends. Sometimes they haven’t changed. Sometimes they have, which is a sign that the reader has changed.

Walton talks (writes) about books with a breezy, familiar tone, taking us into her confidence to tell us about her friends. She correctly denies being a reviewer and incorrectly denies being a critic. A good critic is someone who does one of two things: helps us find books we would otherwise have missed and increases our pleasure in the books we read. Walton does both.

To take one example of the latter: Delany’s Nova is an old favorite of mine, which I haven’t read in several years. She quite casually brings out details that were there all along that I simply never noticed:

There are a lot of science fiction futures with faster-than-light drives, but I wonder if Nova has the fastest one of anything? They zip about the stars as Americans go between cities, for parties.... There are no slow transits of systems, no time lost in hyperspace, no relativistic problems, no gravitational problems, just whizzing along ... and landing directly on the planet when you get there. There’s a whole apparatus and paraphernalia of sf furniture missing.

And, “The theme of Nova is sensory stimulus.”

Now how did I miss those things? But they are true, and they will inform my every reading of Nova from now on. Now that is criticism at its best.

Walton is a writer and a reader whom I trust and whose words will lead me to many books I wouldn’t have read otherwise. She may even have given me an “in” to Lois McMaster Bujold, whose work has previously been, I’m sorry, opaque to me. Certainly she’s given me the will to try Bujold again.

Probably the book’s weakest point is inherent in its nature. Every single one of these 130 posts is delicious. But there’s the potato-chip problem: if you read too many of them at once, they lose their individual pleasure, but it’s hard to stop reading them. I’d say that this book is the perfect read for random moments: in queues, on short bus rides, while waiting on hold on the phone.

And I will almost certainly reread it at some point.

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Dan’l Danehy-Oakes lives in Alameda, California.