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.