Find me a Feeling

This post is nothing to do with tarot! I know, crazy, huh?

In my life outside tarot, I am a voracious reader.  Most years, I read 80 – 100 books. Everything from fluffy chick lit to meaty non-fiction.

Well, almost everything. I don’t like dark stuff. Horror horrifies me. Thrillers and suspense can have me on the verge of nausea. (Yes, it could be that I’m an empath.)  I can tolerate a little violence in the mystery novels I so enjoy reading, but even there, I lean more to cozy mysteries than edgy ones, and the violence I can tolerate has to be off-camera, as it were. Implied and inferred, not recorded in graphic technicolour.

This week I brought a book home from the library which, in the brief review I’d read online, I’d anticipated being a family-saga type book. I expected an uplifting, quirky, witty read. And oh, how I loooove quirky! It might have a bit of emotional drama in it, sure, but nothing too bleak, dark, gruelling.

Then I read the dust jacket.”Dark … breaks your heart … unspeakable hurt … damage …” The review I’d read had talked about quirkiness, wit and humour! (Which is also on the dust jacket, along with “heartbreak” and “shattering”.)

I dipped into it here and there, just to be sure. Nope. The few paragraphs I read pulled my mood down so that I felt weighted with dread. Not for me!

This leads me to a thought. I can avoid the obvious genres that I know will be bad for me — thrillers, horror, suspense, true crime and the like. But for general fiction? I think it would be very useful if you could search these books for keywords in their descriptions. What do you think? You can quickly find the books that will give you the feelings you most like to experience when you read.

Me, I’d be looking for things like ‘quirky’, ‘heart-warming’, ‘inspiring’, ‘laugh-out-loud’, ‘witty’… Things that lift my spirits, distract, encourage, inspire me, make me laugh.

Words like ‘sly’, ‘subversive’, ‘thought-provoking’, ‘intense’, ‘complex’, ‘clever’, ‘off-balance’, might or might not work for me, and would require reading a chapter or two. I can absolutely enjoy all these things, depending on the context and how they’re presented.

But ‘heart-rending’, ‘shattering’, ‘disturbing’, ‘frightening’, ‘chaotic’, ‘painful’… Those I put it down and walk away. There would be days of misery for me, if I persisted through to the end of something like that. It’s not that I expect life to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, and duck my head at any reminder that it’s not always so. Rather, it’s that I’ve experienced my own pain, heart-break, unspeakable hurt — most of us will at some point. I’ve been shattered in my life. Shattered, and then recovered, but really, do I want to revisit that pain?

Me? I do not.

There are people who do, of course. They find it cathartic, perhaps, or affirming, or inspiring. And that’s fine. Likely, these people wouldn’t much enjoy the stuff I like, seeing it, perhaps, as bland and lacking in intensity. And that’s fine, too. My emotional reaction to the books you love reading is not a criticism of you, personally! There are all sorts of people in this world. I do not demand that everyone share my taste. How boring would that be?

So. We’re all different. We all like different things. And that, my friends, that is why the world needs a keyword registry for books!

Is this not a brilliant idea?