Marcus is the friend who got me through Malazan book one, back when I was ready to quit around page eighty, and I owed him a recommendation in return, or at least it felt that way, some unspoken ledger of book debts between people who read a lot together. So when I finished Gormenghast and couldn’t stop talking about Steerpike’s slow, patient climb through the castle’s ridiculous hierarchy, I handed Marcus my copy without really thinking about what he actually reads, which is fast, plot-forward epic fantasy, magic systems with rules he can diagram, stakes that escalate on a predictable curve.
He texted me two weeks later, more polite than the situation probably called for, saying he’d gotten sixty pages in and nothing had happened yet, which, fair, honestly, nothing does happen for a while in that book if your definition of happening involves a quest or a battle. I tried to explain that the castle’s rituals not mattering to anyone anymore was sort of the point, that the slowness was doing real work, and he said, reasonably, that he’d take my word for it but he had a backlog and this wasn’t earning its spot in it.
What stung a little, and what I’ve thought about more than the moment probably deserved, is that I’d recommended it the way I wanted to receive a recommendation, here’s why this matters to me, rather than the way Marcus actually needs one, here’s what happens and here’s why you specifically would like it. Those aren’t the same pitch and I know that, I do it for a living in a different context, matching a manuscript’s argument to the audience that will actually want it, and I still forgot to do it for my own friend over a book I loved.
He’s not going to finish Gormenghast and I’ve made peace with that. I did learn something out of it though, which is to actually ask what someone wants before I hand them the book I’m currently obsessed with, instead of assuming my own enthusiasm is the whole pitch. Marcus, for what it’s worth, has never once made me feel bad about the sixty pages. I’m the one who keeps bringing it up.
What actually helped me see the mismatch clearly was going back and thinking about how he’d originally sold me on Malazan, which is a genuinely demanding series in its own right, dense, unexplained, easy to bounce off. He didn’t tell me why he loved it. He told me exactly what to expect for the first hundred pages, that I wouldn’t understand half of what was happening and that this was normal, not a sign I was reading it wrong, and that the payoff was on the other side of a specific kind of discomfort. That’s a completely different pitch than “I love this, you will too,” and it’s the one that actually worked on me.
I’ve started doing this more deliberately since the Gormenghast miss, describing the actual reading experience rather than my own reaction to it, what a book demands of you in the first fifty pages rather than what it eventually gives back. It’s a smaller, less flattering way to recommend something, there’s no version of “here’s what happens” that carries the same warmth as “I loved this so much I need you to read it too.” But it’s more honest about what I’m actually asking someone to spend their time on, and I think it respects the other person’s reading life more than handing them my own excitement and calling it a map.