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April 28, 2005

a book I wasn't planning to buy

The History of Love has got a good amount of press, and so I stopped by to look at it on Amazon, where I do most of my browsing. I try not to read the customer reviews on Amazon, because I seldom find them useful.

And still I got sucked into the reader reviews on this novel, and I ran into one that ends like this:

Let's be honest. The Serena and the Venus of the celebrity-literary world have arrived on the court; they're mighty talents. Score. Genuine show stoppers. Score. Genuine show offs. They write with a public in mind. And yes, they write terrifically well. THE HISTORY OF LOVE is really good, literally spell-binding, literally charming, inspiring; it's just not great, morally significant literature. I think maybe you can write better! Try showing off for once! Just imagine what YOU could achieve if you tried to write on the subject of love! Go for it!

This is the ending of what must be the nastiest, snidest reader review I have ever run across on Amazon. It is the writer's first Amazon review, which makes me wonder if there's some kind of personal vendetta against this author or novel. It certainly reads that way.

The author is (according to the reviewer) destined to be loved by the literati. The novel doesn't meet the reviewer's standards for morally significant literature. That's good enough for me: I am going out to buy A History of Love, today.

07:11 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

missing right sidebar: a question

IE people: do you see it now?!?!?!!!

08:14 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

my question regarding Oprah

There's a lot of blogish discussion on Oprah Winfrey's book club these days. Will she/won't she reinstate the club, and how, and whether it's a good thing or a bad one.

So I can boil my concerns and questions down like this: first, what is the purpose of the book club? My understanding is that it is meant to encourage reading, especially for people who aren't in the habit. I believe, though I can't find any documentation on this right now, that another of the originally stated goals was to promote authors and books that might not otherwise have much exposure. If somebody can either confirm or correct this point (and point me to a source one way or the other), I would appreciate it.

If in fact the idea is to call attention to books and authors who need promotion, then I think some of the choices are pretty questionable. Bill Cosby does not need a boost from Oprah Winfrey -- and he's been up there more than once. Toni Morrison has a Nobel Prize for literature, so I think she's pretty much set. There are other authors on the list who are very well established, but there are also some who were relatively unknown when their books were chosen. But maybe that wasn't the idea, and the only real goal is to get people to read more. In which case I have some concerns about the methods used.

I know lots of people who aren't in the habit of reading. Many of them are my relatives, just regular folks with nine to five jobs. Some have high powered jobs or very busy lives who don't find the time to read. It's just not a high enough priority for these individuals. So here's the question I asked myself: if I took on the task of getting one or more of these people to read on a regular basis, what books would I hand over to achieve that end?

Take a look at the list of books Oprah has featured thus far:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Back Roads by Tawni O'Dell
The Best Way To Play by Bill Cosby
Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Cane River by Lalita Tademy
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Gap Creek by Robert Morgan
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou
Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Jewel by Bret Lott
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton
The Meanest Thing To Say by Bill Cosby
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Open House by Elizabeth Berg
Paradise by Toni Morrison
The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Songs In Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
Sula by Toni Morrison
Tara Road by Maeve Binchy
The Treasure Hunt by Bill Cosby
Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay
A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons
We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage
Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts
While I Was Gone by Sue Miller
White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Once in a while you hear about a clueless or cruel parent who decides to teach a water phobic kid to swim by throwing him or her into the deep end of the pool. Handing Tolstoy or Morrison or García Márquez or Dandicat to a reluctant reader feels similar to me. These are authors who have produced some great work, but are they best authors to hand to cousin Nancy, who counts herself lucky if she has time to read a magazine in the dentist's waiting room? Nancy needs a story that will really pull her in fast, and hold her attention. Sure, it should be well written, with strong characters. But look at the first two paragraphs of Anna Karenina:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked of the day before just at dinner-time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

In all good faith, I just can't see this working. Not as a first try. Maybe in a few months time when Nancy is already on the hook.

My theory is that Oprah has many dedicated viewers who really want to go along with her book club idea. They buy the books she recommends, a good number of them -- sales do jump when she announces her choice. But I would bet quite a lot that most of the time, the books don't actually get read. They are piled on bedside and coffee tables, where they stay, looking wistful.

My solution? I don't have one. It's Oprah's show, she gets to pick the books. I'll let her get on with that, and watch to see what happens.

11:53 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack