FICTION THAT MAKES ME WANT TO...

3ª Edição da festa Dance!, originally uploaded by Marco a.k.a. MA.

If there's anything in this world that makes me so excited that I want to get up and dance like they do in Brazil, it's good fiction. Fiction so fresh that the happy reader wouldn't be surprised to find a few tender shoots springing up between the pages. Fiction that makes you feel as if you've walked into one person's consciousness, pulled up a chair and really inhabited it.

Like falling in love, that kind of reading experience doesn't happen too often--which is probably a good thing. I mean, I can't dance like they do in Brazil all day every day.

Anyway, it seems like every week or two when I walk out of the library glowing and glittering with my newest cache of books, it always ends the same way. The
books that looked so promising on the shelves fall into four categories:

1. Virtuous Reading: The book's been well reviewed in all the right places and it would undoubtedly benefit my lazy mind and soul to read it. But after a paragraph or two, my mind and soul promptly decides it rather likes its slacker state.

2. Reasonably Satisfying Reading: It pulls me in sufficiently that I read in edible chunks every night before bed. But by the time I reach the middle, I'm forced to ask the big question: Do I really give a damn enough about these invented people to finish their story? Sometimes, if I'm in dutiful schoolgirl mode, I plod onward to the end. Since I've written a couple of novels (as yet unpublished) myself, I know how much proverbial blood and sweat goes into the process and a figure it's the least I can do. But most of the time, I'm a rebel school girl, and I toss it back in my library return basket with the already discarded virtuous reads. Why?
Because in both literature and love, I'm looking for passion. Reasonably satisfying just doesn't cut it.

3. Good novels. These are the ones I really like, enthusiastically recommend, and would never consider putting down before I finish the last paragraph. But neverin the course of reading them do they make me jump up and dance like they do in Brazil. They're good, they're well-behaved, but they never once pick me up by the lapels of my pajamas and shake me.

4. The Novels that readers live for. These are the ones with shoots of grass and the scent of curry, the feel of a tropical of breeze on your cheek trapped within their pages. These are the ones you hold up and shake in people's faces when they say fiction is dead or that no one reads any more.

Small Island by Andrea Levy is the first one that comes to mind, since I'm currently reading it.

A few more that have brought out my inner Brazilian dancer:

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Is anyone noticing a pattern here? Is it just me or is the U.K. producing the best fiction these days?