Book Reports: A Call to Action!
And e-z book report instructions for you
The project I’ve been working on - and the catalyst for this whole working with the garage door open thing - is a “book report” inspired by Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. I think the form of the book report holds a lot of promise, and this is me trying to make my case.
My book report was and is, shall we say, a little much: 200+ handmade pages that I worked on off and on for four years. No one asked for it. There was no deadline. So I just kept going. And going. And going.
By continuing to futz with it - to practice - it somehow just happened, but I have also come to believe that book reports are a really promising form. I’m never going to read all the books I want to read. The TBR (To Be Read) pile on my nightstand will probably topple over and wound me in my sleep.
There are also lots of books I want to have read while simultaneously knowing that I will never read them. These books are usually too long or too academic or too pretentious (or all three!) for me to read, but it’s not that I’m not interested in them at all. Cue…the book report. Ideally, it is written by someone I know and respect who might explain the book to me and why they care about it (and, therefore, why I might care). For the book report writer, it’s a way of processing a book’s ideas and sharing them with someone else.
A book report is different from a book review though they are, of course, related. For a review, I can read The New York Times Book Review or go to Goodreads. If I just want a summary, I guess I could ask Claude. I’m often looking for something slightly different. A way of understanding the book, but also a way of understanding the person making the book report, too.
I think the structure of a book report needs to be simple, or else no one will do it. One of the reasons I think some people don’t write reviews is the pressure to write something witty or funny or deep. Who has time for all that? I like zine book reports because they don’t take too much work. Copy a couple of quotes, include an anecdote that a passage reminded you of, maybe a weird sketch of the author. Boom! Book report. Maybe that book report will spur someone else to read the actual book, as in the case of this book report that Courtney wrote about Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger.
Doppelganger came out in 2023, and while I had read about it, I didn’t think I needed to actually read it because I figured I had the gist - Naomi Klein is often mistaken for Naomi Wolf. Weirdness ensues. But after reading Courtney’s book report about the ways that Klein’s book made Courtney feel “more grounded and clear-sighted in a world that has become so mystifying and fear-inducing”, I decided to read it, and I think Doppelganger is the best book about attention that I’ve read since How to Do Nothing.
Book reports are a way of understanding a book but they’re also a way of understanding the people writing them. That’s certainly true for my project which is about Jenny’s book, but which is mostly about me - what I think about Jenny’s book, what I think about all sorts of things.
I’ll be writing a lot more about book reports and more collective forms of reading and writing. And in the meantime, if you want to give it a shot, here are some instructions for making your own book report in the form of a one-page zine. If you make one, let me know; I’d love to read it.
I was excited that this book report got another enthusiastic viewing from my sister-in-law who just read Klein's amazing and timely book. I like that it is either a way to get the cliff notes of friend's perspective and/or a way to see how a friend experienced a book you read yourself.