I pushed Anathem on Priya for months before she finally caved and bought a copy, and I want to be honest about why I pushed it so hard, because looking back the reasons were mostly about me and not about her. I’d just finished it myself, I was still a little dazzled by the made up vocabulary once it clicked into place, and I think I wanted company in that specific feeling more than I actually stopped to consider whether the book suited how she reads.

She called me about a week later, sixty some pages in, and said, not unkindly, “I don’t know what a calca is and I don’t think I’m going to find out.” Fair. Completely fair. Priya reads fast, she wants forward motion, and Anathem asks you to sit in unfamiliar vocabulary for the better part of a hundred pages before the plot gives you much of a foothold. I’d known that going in. I’d read the exact same complaint from other readers before I ever recommended the book to her, and I waved it off because my own experience getting past that hurdle had been so worth it.

What bothers me in hindsight isn’t that she didn’t like it, plenty of good books aren’t for plenty of good readers, it’s that I recommended it the way you’d hand someone a gift you actually wanted for yourself. I wasn’t thinking about Priya’s actual reading habits, her real impatience with unexplained jargon, which I’ve watched firsthand at the game table when a rulebook makes her wait too long to tell her what a symbol means. I was thinking about how much I wanted someone else to have the experience I’d just had.

I’ve tried to recalibrate since. When I recommend something now I try to ask myself whether I’m recommending it for the actual person in front of me or for the version of myself that just finished it and wants an audience. It’s a small distinction and I still get it wrong sometimes, but Anathem was a clear enough miss that I noticed the pattern, finally, after probably doing this same thing to other people for years without catching it.

Priya has since recommended me exactly one thing in return, out of what I suspect is quiet retaliation, and it was a five hundred page military history I have not started yet. I deserve that.