On her website, she talks about how she selected those titles, and gives a few of the others people mentioned when she asked them what book “matters most.” Hood indulges herself with the book group discussions, having each member choose a classic so she can give her own readers some background and talk about (hard to avoid using Jo Walton’s phrase here) “what makes this book so great.” She includes Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Catcher in the Rye, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Slaughterhouse-Five. Ava “missed the rituals of her young family” and has decided to join a book group because she is “desperate for company, desperate for conversation….Not just for company, but for something more, a deeper connection to people.” I think many of us who have taken to the internet to find like-minded readers can identify with that. We find out that Ava is alone because her children are grown, her husband left her for another woman, her sister died when she was young, after which her mother disappeared, and her father has dementia. This novel is about how a fictional book matters most to its main character, Ava. Like if you’re unhappy and you read, I don’t know, On the Road or The Three Musketeers and that book changes how you feel or how you think, then it matters the most. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not. But Hood disarms most of my objections, as one of her characters talks about “the idea of the book that matters most” and why it’s “impossible to pick such a book. And, like many people who love books, I get a little weary of proclaiming and defending my list of favorites, by any other name (most important, most influential, by genre, by century, even the book one would “be” in a Fahrenheit 451 world).
I was skeptical about Ann Hood’s novel The Book That Matters Most because I don’t usually like books about people who love books I find most of them overly precious and irritatingly contrived.
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