How to Buy a Love of Reading

 Book 11 of my 2025 Reading Challenge

read from January 16 - 21

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

published 2009

Summary (via the book jacket)

To Carley Wells, words are the enemy. Her tutor's innumerable SAT flashcards. Her personal trainer's "fifty-seven pounds overweight" assessment. And the endless assignments from her English teacher, Mr. Nagel. When Nagel reports to her parents that she has answered the question "What is your favorite book?" with "Never met one I liked," they decide to fix what he calls her "intellectual impoverishment." They will commission a book to be written just for her - one she'll have to love - that will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their family's devotion to the arts. They will be patrons - the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter the love of reading.

Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine loving books, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carley's best friend and Fox Glen's resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her lately as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.

When the Wellses move writer Bree McEnroy - author of a failed meta-novel about Odysseus's journey home through the Internet - into their mansion to write Carley's book, Carley's sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter from drinking and give them something to share. But as Hunter's behavior becomes erratic and dangerous, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the fictional world Bree has created, and begins to understand for the first time the power of stories - those we read, those we want to believe in, and most of all, those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Stories powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.

My Opinion

5 stars

The title caught my eye while browsing at the library and even though the summary gave me a moment's pause that too many things were being tried in one plot, I decided to give it a try.  The emotions snuck up on me and I didn't realize until after it was over that I considered it a 5 star read, even though I still can't succinctly describe all the plots going on.

  

It was a "just one more chapter" kind of book and the ending made me sigh in a perfect way even though it was sad.  As I read I was so frustrated and angry at the self-destruction but it made it easier that it felt like a controlled environment; characters really didn't seem to be destroying anyone but themselves until everything fell apart.  I was fully invested and never bored.

Quote from the Book

"There are people that understand life the first time through. They grasp what someone's saying when it's said. Read stories into gestures and expressions. Draw out moments, slow down time. Shape what happens as it happens, sculptors of their lives.

Carley Wells was no sculptor. Only after a moment had already set - past changing, past tense - could she ever get her hands around it."