Seeing past the critics

Bad books can very often be found behind good reviews - but how else can you find your way to the stuff you'll enjoy?

There are some people, I suppose, who read book reviews in newspapers and think: that sounds like my kind of thing; go out and buy the book it - and it is their kind of thing. Well, this has never happened to me.

A good part of my childhood I spent reading the books pages of newspapers, but I lacked the money to read what I read about. Gaining access at the age of 16 to a fully stocked library, I finally got my hands on one or two of the most highly praised. Only then did I discover how cruelly I had been misled.

Where were those matchless prose poems which needed to be read and re-read? Those books of Dickensian (nay Shakespearean) plenty, born of a restless, uncompromising intelligence? Where was that profound simplicity and that Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousness? So I looked along the other shelves and let myself be led astray by Kafka and Joyce and August Strindberg.

But where can you turn if you've lost faith in the critics?

To the Costa maybe, or the Booker? But aren't these just conditioned by the same principles, if not awarded by entirely the same people? So for a long time I just sat about reading the classics. The canon gave me at least the assurance of quality. If people asked me, I would say that there were no good writers left. Certainly it was too much effort to find them.

After a time I came to discover another truth: that if someone had bothered to translate a writer out of a foreign language then they were probably worth reading.

And this discovery led me to another: that there were imprints which tended to publish books I liked: The Harvill Press, for instance, or Quartet Encounters, or The Texas Pan American Series.

Many years passed and I imagined by that time I knew quite a lot about literature.

Then I discovered the internet, and on the internet I discovered things called blogs. There were even literary blogs, and some of the people who wrote on these liked to say the same things I said, so I read them.

Here and there on these literary blogs I heard it mentioned that Alasdair Gray and Peter Handke were great writers. I thought this was funny because, as I say, I had been reading the books sections of newspapers for years and I had never heard of them. Could it be, I wondered, that amidst all the glowing reviews I had read for writers I couldn't bear, I had passed over a glowing review or two for a writer of true genius?

Anyway, they sounded like my kind of thing; so I went out and bought them and read them; and they were my kind of thing.

Now my life is becoming saturated by the new writers I discover, culled from pages about lost classics, for instance, and university reading lists for foreign-language courses. In fact, it is only the authors who are everywhere praised and talked-about that I don't seem to read.

Are there any other strategies, in this era of indiscriminate praise, to separate the wheat from the chaff?