RE: Fierce Appetites Thu, 04 Apr 2024 Book review, Opinion ==================== ``Fierce Appetites'' is a memoir written by Elizabeth Boyle, an Irish historian who relates her experiences of the past 4 decades to various writings surviving from medieval times. There... was that so hard to put on the cover of the book? ----------------------------------------------------------------- This book was given to me by a friend when she had to move back to her home country after an exchange year at my university. This book, as I alluded to above, markets itself horribly. The cover, which is what all of us judge a book on, contains four main elements: 1. The title ``fierce appetites which does not really tell you much about the book at all. 2. A subtitle reading ``Lessons from my year of untamed thinking'', this is both uninformative and wrong, more on that later. 3. A medieval-style drawing of a man and a woman in reclined embrace. Given this, one might expect a book akin to the kama sutra, but no. Hence: uninformative. 4. No less than thirteen exclamations of praise with another seven on the inside cover. Let me start with this last point. The 20 sentences expressing how much others enjoyed this book add absolutely no value. Firstly, I don't recognize any of the names on the cover, and I would consider myself a moderately well-read person. Furthermore, all of the listed people seemed to be in a competition to write the least informative phrase possible while also showing off their own erudition. ``Pure nectar for the imagination'' ... Uhm, okay. I wouldn't consider a memoir to be the thing to read if you want to let your imagination loose, but I guess this is fine. ``Like nothing else you will ever read'' This one made me think whether everyone listed on the cover even read the book. This is such a cookie-cutter response (and furthermore in all-likelihood just wrong, or at least over-the-top) that you can say it about any book without even taking the time to read it. ``I loved this luminous, radical book about bodies in time'' This one made me wonder too. There is one chapter about bodies yes, but that certainly is not what this book is about. Did you do the homework Mr and Mrs EXAMINER ``Fiercely smart, strange, surmising, unsettling, and unflinching'' Yeah, lets just cover all bases here, one of them has to apply right? Other quotes contain words as informative as `interesting', `good', `intriguing', and `wonderful'. Let's move to the title and subtitle. Firstly ``fierce appetites'', is that what this book is about? The first few chapters deal with the loss of a loved one... Nothing appetizing there. Substance abuse is covered, I suppose addiction is a type of appetite at least. Religion... If I squint this fits. But parenting, lockdowns, academia and war? The subtitle is inaccurate. This book is in fact not ``lessons from a year of untamed thinking''. The book is laid out in twelve chapters with names matching the months of the year, but that about as far as the connection goes. Some months do correspond to events that actually happened in that year in that month, but most of them are just random events that occurred throughout the author's life. `Untamed thinking'' is not mentioned once, in fact the author reveals that she wasn't approached about the book until later on in the year, even though the book starts in January. Lastly, there are no `lessons'. In fact, the author seems intent on not teaching any life lessons, but rather to point out how her life is falling apart and being held together only by medication, alcoholism, and unrestrained sexual behaviour. So... The cover is not useful. The layout of the book is strange, and does not correspond with the content. The title and subtitle are just plain wrong (though the subtitle was changed to a more informative phrase in later editions). But why get so upset over it? I will tell you why: because this is a good book. Not a great book, but certainly worth a quick read. And I feel as though this is a great example of good writing being held back by horrible editing. Clearly the editor had an idea. They read the book and the drafts and extracted from it `lessons' about ``fierce appetites''. They decided to layout the book in a diary-format, with each chapter being one month, and fit the subtitle to that idea (or even worse: the other way around). I don't feel as though these editorial decisions were made with the style of the author in mind. There are so many ways in which the content of the book and the editing could be made to fit better, but as it stands, the book is held back by the person in charge of selling the story inside. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It is a few days later now and I check some of the books I have with me for similar patterns. Certainly the proclamations by other authors often lack substance, but I would still say that Fierce Appetites is a particularly bad example. Not least because of the sheer number of quotations on the cover.