Dear Writer,
Thank you for allowing me to apply for the job as your reader. You will find attached a list of the principal works that I have read in recent years. Some of these writers have been good enough to friend me on Facebook. And if you ask them, I’m sure that they would be willing to give me a good reference.
Except for Shakespeare. But if he were still alive, I’m sure that he would give me a good reference too. Just like William Faulkner gave a good reference to Oprah Winfrey.
I hope you will excuse my nuance of immodesty but readers need to blow their own horns when they are applying for a job. Otherwise, I might wind up like one of those wallflower book club members. You know, the kind that bring the snack when it’s their turn but never make a comment. Why ever not? You mean you can read Anna Karenina in the 862 page Penguin Classics edition and have NOTHING to say about it??
I’d like to assure you that I’ve read Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism backwards and forwards. If Alexander Pope were still alive and on Facebook, I’m sure he would friend me.
If I like the book I am reading, I always check if the writer is on Facebook as soon as I reach page 5. Read five pages. Like? Go on Facebook. If the author is not on Facebook, I’m broad-minded. Maybe they are too busy writing.
There is no greater pleasure than discovering a new writer that you love. But I follow Pope, my would-be Facebook friend, in understanding that I shouldn’t be pissed off if the author has written the book they wanted to write and not the book that I wanted to read. I don’t expect 300 pages of perfection. I expect to be more impressed by the overall conception of the work and not pick apart the details. I don’t follow the crowd in my reading but I recognize that sometimes the crowd is right.
I think of myself as a walking indie bookstore self-contained.
As for my salary requirements, I’m afraid that readers of my calibre don’t come cheap. The cost to you is that for every book of yours that I read, I will want to think about it. And that I am always moved to comment. So I commit myself to think about your work. But what I think is entirely up to me.
My reader’s compass is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He felt that you should never let a book push you around. I’m sorry that he can’t friend me on Facebook, or Henry David Thoreau either.
It’s like the ducks that I see in the cove by the mouth of the Hudson River, every day as I walk to work. They fly wherever they will along the shores of the cove in weather harsh or mild. It’s a bitter earnestness that makes beauty as Robinson Jeffers says.
Now it’s resplendent that those ducks have freedom of flight. But there’s always a risk that a bird will mistake its path and end up getting lost in the open sea. But I mustn’t be afeared of that and neither must you as the writer. There is nothing more honorable than getting lost in a book.
