Reviewer Spotlight

Branch: Freedom Regional

This month Reader's Club honors James K., who is an avid reader of literary fiction and a member of the Reader's Club Team. He has contributed many insightful reviews of both fiction and non-fiction. Here are his thoughts on reading and writing reviews: Most avid readers tell sweet stories about how, growing up, books were like dear friends and they could always be found cozying up to one. My story is not so neat and clean. I spent most of my younger days avoiding books and, while I'm not proud of it, the fact is, I did not start reading for pleasure until after I finished college. In the dozen or so years since then, however, my appetite for books has been voracious. Some of my close friends joke that I am a book snob, since I read literary fiction almost exclusively and pepper these selections with only an occasional non-fiction title. In the last few years, I have been drawn to first novels like Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu, and Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. In my experience, authors seem to put everything they have into that first novel. They try harder the first time out. This is why first novels almost always make for interesting reading. In fact, my favorite book, which happens to have been written right here in Charlotte, is a first novel-- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I have always enjoyed Southern writers like McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Larry Brown. Since I am a slow reader, generally getting through only two titles per month, I try to select books that are well-written and convey a strong sense of place or introduce me to a culture that is different from my own. I find that titles like these are the easiest to write reviews about. These days, our lives are lived at such a quick pace and our connections to each other and to society at large tend to suffer. I feel that reading and sharing books offers us one way to slow down. It can foster a dialogue and bring people together, pointing out the ways we are the same in a world that tends to focus negatively on what makes us different.