Admire the following opening sentence:
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
Thus begins the novel Changing Places, by David Lodge.
Isn't it a great first sentence? Don't you want to know what the second sentence says?
The best openings of books act like an attack of chloroform. They immediately dose the reader with the atmosphere of the book.
But you know what ruins the effectiveness of a chloroform attack? Advance warning.
All too often, that warning comes from the book itself. An innocent reader, intrigued by a title or a cover, flips the book to the back, and starts to read:
Euphoric State University with it's whitestone, sun-drenched campus and England's damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual professor exchange scheme—
Stop! Stop! I don't want to know about that exchange program! The author hasn't decided I need to know it yet. That's a whole five pages of elegant prose dented by a premature disclosure on the part of the marketer. And that's just the first sentence: if I dare to read on, I might know the plot of the first third of the book before I've even opened the first page.
In an ideal world, these blurbs wouldn't exist. Every reader could have the privilege of diving into a novel with the first sentence, blissfully unaware of what lies ahead.
I have three main gripes with blurbs on novels.1
The first is the one I cited above: the back of the book spoils the book's introduction. (If you're lucky! Sometimes the blurb spoils the whole ending, as when an edition of classic book raves of "strong characterization, from the atmospheric beginnings to the tragic ending.")
The second gripe is more subtle: blurbs change my relationship to the book.
Have you ever been to an art museum which only gives the title of each artwork? Every time I go to a museum without labels, I find myself much more engaged by the artwork. I have no answer key to the painting in front of me; only I can notice the details the painter left on the canvas.
Similarly, reading a book without a description is like walking through a forest without a map. I must explore the space around me, and slowly sink into the environment. Having a book description is like having a satellite photo of the forest: it might help me orient quicker, but also, it makes me judge everything I read in relation to what I know is coming.2
Third, I think blurbs unfairly hurt good books that sound boring.
A good blurb exists to convince readers to buy the book, usually by sharing the novel's premise. A novel with a strong premise is going to sell better, so authors are incentivized to write with intriguing premises.
A good premise isn't a bad thing in itself, but not all good books have compelling premises. Take War and Peace. What's it about? Well, a bunch of Russian aristocrats navigate War ... and Peace. I'm sure someone more clever than I could find a good hook, but the book's form does not lend itself well to pithy summarization. (I'm sure almost every description today would sell it is as a Tolstoy masterpiece, instead of on the plot).
Regardless, War and Peace is a great book, and well worth a read. A world with blurbs disadvantages books that defy easy summing up, or which situate themselves in the most pedestrian of circumstances. Can't we let each book speak for itself?
Not really, I admit. We still have to choose which books to read. If not blurbs, then what?
I usually read the books that come into my life, either by gift or happenstance. That way, I can worry less about whether I'm initially attracted to any given book, and more whether I enjoy it in the moment.
That's not a perfect system; I realize it doesn't work for everyone. Still, I think there are plenty of ways to choose what to read that don't rely on having two to four paragraphs of summary before you open the first page.
Like reading a blog post that tangentially mentions a book called Changing Places and deciding to read it yourself.3
Author's note: I wrote this quickly, and it's probably all wrong. Let me know how I messed up in the comments, or by emailing me at kai [at] liquidbrain [dot] net.