There are those of us who have taken our love of reading to a weird level: we read for a living. It’s not easy to get a job like this, there are lot of people who would give up their dignity to work someplace “glamourous” where they can get paid to “read” books. Some of us are lucky, and have achieved this glorious dream. After working at some crappy internships, then some better ones, and after surviving the publishing bootcamp known as “The Columbia Publishing Course” I got the call. I work for a literary agent and love my job. My workload consists of 90% not reading. But the 10% of reading-related work is exciting, and awesome, and like I said, I love my job.
But reading The Passage was a singular experience for me. I read it for work, an issue of familiarity. I probably never would have picked this book up otherwise. I’m just not a long vampire saga type of girl, nothing wrong with that. I actually procrastinated reading The Passage for this reason, I am among the last at my agency to have read it, and I was feeling a little out of the loop at the water cooler, so to speak. I had a long trip, with flights and a long layover, so I brought The Passage with me. And no joke, this book saved my life during the six hours I spent at the Frankfurt airport, since I probably would have fallen asleep and been robbed/quietly murdered or just missed my flight if I hadn’t had this addictive story with me.
The Passage, as established above, is unlike the books I normally pick up, which is exactly why it is perfect “work reading.” Work reading can be educational, it can be tedious, it can be terrible. The Passage was indeed educational, it taught me a lot about thrillers. But unlike some of the manuscripts I’ve been tasked with during my work as a reader, The Passage was incredible. Reading it was like reading a book of instructions for things you should look for in a manuscript, and as someone who is doing the looking I greatly appreciated the quasi-tutorial. Justin Cronin’s intricate plot, detailed and developed characters, and sense of place combine to create a mammoth thriller; at 800 or so pages I even closed the book wanting more. It was fun to isolate the reasons why this books works, to recognize the potential of the book after the fact. I tried to put myself in the mindset of not knowing the success of The Passage, seeing it from a slush pile perspective. And I was immediately swept-away by the story, the writing. A chapter in and I knew I would have called this guy up after a hours of night-blind reading.
Criticizing something good is harder than expressing why something is bad. One of the reasons I started this blog was to improve my skills and writing about why I liked a book. Writing about The Passage is actually hard, an unintelligent “IT’S AWESOME” doesn’t suffice. You can’t gush about something without a reason to, and the things I read that are middle of the road, even in my personal reading, are the most difficult for me. When there’s something to like, but not overwhelmingly, I sit and think over the blank screen, “How do I decide to like or dislike this book?” The Passage taught me how to see this more clearly in books that I’m less expert on, thrillers and commercial fiction in general. It feels good to take those lessons and apply them.
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