The art of blurbing

This is a reworked post from my old, now abandoned, 52 Books blog. I’ll be taking that blog down as soon as I remember where I stored the password...

Blurb: noun [C]

a short description of a book or film, etc., written by the people who have produced it, and intended to make people want to buy it or see it: The blurb on the back of the book says that it 'will touch your heart'.

(from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

I have mentioned several times the importance of good blurbs on books. By that I meant the teasers on the back cover or on the inside flap of the dustcover that are designed to entice a potential reader into buying the book. The good ones do this by giving the reader just enough enticing information to want the to find out more.

The worst of the bad ones give away an important plot element or even the ending of a book. Giving away the ending of a romance is usually okay because romance readers already know that the hero and heroine will get together at the end, but please don’t tell me how it happened – I’d like to find that out by reading the book. However, when I sit down to a whodunit I want to be kept guessing and not get told in a blurb just who did what (the how and to whom is okay, unless the author meant it to be a surprise).

Another type of bad blurb I loathe is the kind that gives erroneous or misleading information (see my review of Anthony Bourdain’s Bone in the Throat for a good example of both).

The other blurbs, the ones I like to call "gushers" - the often overwrought quotes by reviewers, famous authors and the occasional celebrity - can be funny or just plain horrible. The funny ones are those which have obviously been edited to leave out unfavourable wording and also the ones that are very carefully worded to sound like praise but are really saying: "I hated this book, but I'm too polite to say so."

The horrible ones are the long, gushing passages taken, apparently unchanged, from published reviews. If the book then turns out to be less than what I was given to expect from all the praise, I am not going to be inclined to ever trust that particular reviewer or publication to recommend books to me again. In fact, I was stung so often by believing these things as a trusting teenager that I became quite cynical about them and now only read them for fun.

While I'm on that subject, I have a piece of advice for publishers: Two pages of gusher blurbs are not going to make me any more interested in a book than a well-crafted teaser on the back cover. For example, I hate, hate, hate opening a new Nora Roberts novel and having to search through several pages of quotes about her other books in order to find the title page. And it’s not even as if Roberts needs these quotes.

I am especially disinclined to trust recommendations by famous authors. So what if Stephen King thought a book was good? I don't know what kind of taste he has in literature. And so what if XXXX thought a particular book was great? She may be sleeping with the author, be a friend or relative of the author, or have been compelled by her publisher or agent to push the book. She may even be under contract to do so.

For all of these reasons, I usually save the gusher blurbs until last, which has the added advantage of making them easier to decipher.

P.S. I love reading back-cover blurbs on books I know I will never read, for example the Mills & Boon romances. The publishers know that people do not buy these books because they are dying to know who the heroine will end up with - it is therefore OK for the blurb to give a hint, even an assurance, as to the identity and basic personality of Mr. Right. The blurbs on these books are really like little condensations of the story, minus all the little twists, and you are never in doubt as to how the book will end. In the case of romances, giving away the identity of the hero is essential because people buy romances for two things: they like to experience the satisfaction of falling and being in love, even if it's only for as long as it takes to read the story, and they what to see the twists that finally bring the lovers together. They also want to be sure they will like the hero and heroine. What they don't want is to be kept wondering throughout half the book which male character is Mr. Right.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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