My flight from Chicago to Las Vegas, although non-stop, clocked in at a few minutes over four hours in length. I don’t mind flying, but I hate being on planes. I can get bored in a room of TVs, so being 6’2″ in a middle seat designed for a 5’8″ average for hours on end with nothing to do and no place to go can make me a little batty. I don’t sleep well on planes and usually just end up listening to music while staring at the back of the seat in front of me. When that gets boring I read.
Sadly for me, I finished my book before even getting to the airport and it wasn’t until I took out my iPod at the gate that I noticed that the battery was almost dead. It was a late flight but I was wide awake (further decreasing my already slim chance of sleeping) and so the prospect of doing absolutely nothing for four hours was simply too terrifying to accept. With some time to spare before takeoff I made my way to a surprisingly decent bookstore in the terminal. I casually grazed over the front display stand’s usual suspects: Clancy, Grisham, Romance-Novelist-Of-The-Week. After skipping over these literary happy meals I made my way into the stacks and eventually found the fiction section. As a general bookstore rule I judge my books by their covers; the key to discovery being either a clever title (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) or a noticeable lack of cover art*.
My first criteria was met when my eyes happened to land upon a book titled No Country For Old Men, but sadly it failed my cover art criteria. When I went to put it back on the shelf I noticed a much more aesthetically pleasing novel written by the same author. The title to the second book was The Road: an acceptably clever title given the allure of its simplicity. The back cover synopsis was moderately provocative, but the back-breaking straw of hay for me was the golden circle upon the front cover that claimed this book to be the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I have been fairly busy lately and somehow forgot to watch the Pulitzer Prize awards show this year so I couldn’t say for sure if it was true, but I am pretty sure that you can’t just say that your book won the Pulitzer Prize if it didn’t. I mean, I could make up a nice graphic declaring LittleWyvern.com to be the winner of the Greatest Website on the Web Award, but I doubt you are allowed to pull that sort of thing off in the real world. I temporarily took the circle’s word for it, though later I found confirmation; The Road did indeed win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year.
I bought the book.
The plane ride was expectedly tedious but between long stretches of staring at the back of the seat (in silence once my iPod went dry) I managed to read a little over half of The Road. The book is strange but good, confusing in its ability to be both boring and amazing at the same time. Before going to bed Tuesday night I jumped onto Amazon real quick to get a taste of the world’s general opinion of the book I bought. What I discovered was devastating.
Search Term: The Road
Top Result: The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy
God. Just kill me now.
How could I have known?!! Oprah’s friggin Book Club.
I bought it because it won the Pulitzer!!
I SWEAR!!!!!!!!!
Oh, in case you didn’t know, I absolutely despise Oprah’s Book Club. It started with good intentions I’m sure, but at this point her “Book Club” is little more than a satanic cocktail of capitalism and brainwashing. It’s unadulterated evil packaged with a cute sticker. Seriously though, how many completely awful books in a row would Oprah have to recommend before her next recommendation didn’t instantly hit #1 on the Amazon Bestseller list***? I am all for reading, but it kills me to know that the perceived success of any book can be instantly changed by one person’s opinion.
“But I have my own opinion!!” shouts the collective mass of middle-aged women who Tivo Oprah every single day.
No.
No you don’t.
You think you do… but you really don’t. And that’s what makes Oprah so goddamn evil****.
So while I bought a book because of it’s title, cover, and Pulitzer success, I have inadvertently become what I hate. I go to sleep tonight with the heavy burden of knowing that I accidentally helped make the world of tomorrow just a little bit worse.
* This is a primary reason why I do my best to avoid buying books tied to movies. I really don’t need Matt Damon on the cover of The Bourne Identity or Orlando Bloom on my copy of Lord of the Rings. It is a statistical fact that 90% of all cover art is bad and 97% of it is unnecessary**.
** Lesser known statistical fact: The remaining 10 and 3 percents all involve cartoon characters and/or pictures of swords.
*** Well, number TWO for the eighteen months leading up to The Deathly Hallows.
**** For further evidence see: My Favorite Things… soon to be Your Favorite Things.
when you read something and you enjoy it, and you know that person enjoyed writeing it, who gives a flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks!
I don’t think you should be as cynical as you are about the books…getting mad at Oprah is fine, and the people she affects is fine…but don’t get mad at the books.
I read The Road a while ago and I really couldn’t quite figure out how to describe it to people…but “boring and amazing at the same time” pretty much is exactly how I felt. It really was a little bit of a struggle for me to get through the first half or so of the book, but in the end I actually really enjoyed it. I think it was more his writing style in the beginning that caused me to be bored. But in the end I liked it even more because of the style.
When “The Pillars of the Earth” become one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things” I seriously wanted to cry. One of my favorite books of all-time…(which I’ve told you to read in the past). Plus, the sequel to Pillars just came out…bought it a couple weeks ago. Once I finish HP7 I’ll start on the Pillars sequel. And Middlesex is apparently good as well…although I haven’t read it.
Anyway, my point is that you shouldn’t not read a book just because it’s a Book Club book. You could miss out on some really good books…(aka The Road and Pillars).
Oh, and wasn’t the point of buying that weird typewriter computer thing to be able to write on a plane/places like that?
I obviously don’t blame the books, but I don’t like the system that they are made a part of. I guess that my frustration is more that I can buy a book because it is good (The Road, Pillars, etc), but by doing that I automatically help the system. There is no real-world difference between my buying a book because it’s good and because Oprah told me to; my reasons behind the purchase become irrelevant. So yeah, I don’t blame the book or the author but I still don’t have to like the messy side effects.
*insert shannara joke*
ugh… still scarred by toni morrison’s ‘beloved’
It turns out that we OWN that book, and while I found it strange as well I did in fact read it cover to cover (and then tried to figure out WTF it was about).
I guess your cynicism is a sign of how far we have come. When I was growing up it would have been impossible to think that a black woman’s recommnedation on a book would be deemed “the system”. She isn’t recommending the book because she needs the money or even profits from it. I believe she is doing it because she recognizes the value of reading and is trying to expand the minds of her audience who for many of them have no adult conversation or brain stimulation as they try to run a household and keep their children clean and fed. It’s really awful that she is encouraging people to read Pulizter Prize winning books, is it? Could it possibly be that she added it to her book club because it won a Pulitzer Prize and she thought people should read it, just like you thought you should read it because it won the prize? What’s so wrong with that? I really don’t get it.
I wrote this sentence in my post at least five times but couldn’t decide where it would fit in and so ultimately left it out:
“It isn’t even Oprah’s fault, either.”
She probably does this with good intentions – even though she definitely profits from it, though probably not directly from the winning publishers. However, simply because of her massive influence over our population her recommendation will INHERENTLY be negative in my mind. This has nothing to do with the books being chosen or the reasons that they were (I give her the benefit of the doubt here and assume that she picks books that she has already read and likes). Every book she chooses could be THE most amazing book ever written and the system would still be obnoxious to me. Here are a few reasons why…
1. Consider the fact that all major book sellers include “(Oprah’s Book Club)” in some form in their listed TITLE of the book. This isn’t a case of Oprah simply saying “go read my book.” Her recommendation immediately and dramatically affects all facets of the publishing business. There isn’t just a list that you can find on her website… or even BarnesAndNoble.com. You can do a TITLE search on “Oprah’s Book Club” inside the inventory of these bookstores. She didn’t write the book. She didn’t edit or publish the book. But for reasons based purely upon capitalism her name is now and forever implanted into the book.
2. Imagine a high school where the most popular girl in school decides to wear pink shoes one day. Everybody else in the school sees this and start wearing pink shoes too. The pink shoes may be comfortable, but wouldn’t you still find it just a little bit obnoxious to see more and more people start showing up in pink shoes? Would there be something wrong with the person who didn’t wear pink shoes specifically because everyone else was doing it?
3. Consider Oprah’s My Favorite Things annual episode. Originally it started as a genuine attempt to share those things that Oprah liked around the holidays. But because it is Oprah (again, it isn’t exactly her fault that she’s popular) the episode has evolved into a very different animal today. Companies campaign throughout the year to be one of Oprah’s favorite things. Where she originally paid for audience gifts herself, today everything is eagerly donated to the show in hopes of using it as a major advertising spot. Oprah is quite literally being marketed to in the hopes that she in turn will market to the world through her seemingly innocent list of “My Favorite Things.” I don’t know what exactly is involved in the process for being selected to Oprah’s Book Club, but I find it a bit ridiculous to think that given the huge amounts of publishing revenue on the line that her monthly choice is merely the bundle of random pages on her nightstand. Because I tell you this: if I were a publisher it would be a thin and distant line that I wouldn’t cross to win her endorsement for my book.
I mean, consider the controversy that erupted just today over the inherent conflict between advertising revenue and honest opinions. And that was over just a few hundred thousand dollars between two moderately-sized corporations. This is OPRAH we are talking about here. The natural conflict between business and integrity must be exponentially greater in her case.
And once again…
“It isn’t even Oprah’s fault, either.”
you never answered jim’s question about why you didn’t “write” using your new typewriter thingy
i did. but not here.
Fair enough. Did you see that Oprah is campaigning for Obama. Will that help or hurt in your mind?
I can’t imagine that it could hurt him, though I read an article that said it might not really help either. Oprah brings money, publicity, and excitement – three things that Obama already has in spades.
I expect the endorsement is just an ‘as expected’ result. It would be very bad if Oprah had endorsed someone else (a non-black candidate), but there is not a whole lot to gain now that she has. I would think that it would be a situation that only has downside for Obama. Fortunately he has avoided that downside.