Below, I've written what I'll call a personal ad describing what I imagine my ideal book to be like.
If this imaginary book sounds like any real book you know, I'd be very happy to hear about that book. Please post in the comments section or email myidealbook@gmail.com. Thank you
If I were to look for my the best book I've ever read the way I'd look for a mate, this is the personal ad I would write for it.
I want to read about a woman who thinks up and carries out a project of her own devising. I don’t much care what it is she does—build a school, write a symphony—but I want it to be high cost, high reward and I want it to succeed, in whatever way she defines success, ideally after difficulties and failures. I’d like to this to be a project begun without the lure of external rewards: no deadlines, no contracts, no promise of fame and glory to keep her working on it. I want her to do this project while being buffeted by those forces of circumstance and of our own creation—earn money, cook dinner, tend to children—that can fill a day from morning to night if she does not make the most vigorous of efforts to allow herself to work on her project.
I want to hear everything she thinks and feels along the way. For this reason, I think fiction story would be better: I find fiction tends to show me every inch of a protagonist better than even the most self-revelatory of autobiographies.
I’m as interested in her spirit as in her actions. I want her to be kind, upright, and generous. Accomplishment won by bad behavior means little to me. I want her to be modest, and here’s the degree of modesty I’d like to see: I want her to achieve as anonymously as she can so that she might never risk being the sort of person people want to meet so they can praise her.
Does such a book exist? Do you know of a book that has any of these elements? Or that has variants on them (a man instead of a woman protagonist? a biography instead of a work of fiction)?
