Famous People Who Read

I scanned through my email this morning and saw a blog pitch email with the title "Celebrate the magic of the season", and I thought "The magic of WHAT SEASON". I can't remember if Nicole starts Tiny Secret Festive Season on the actual first day of November, but I am NOT ready to start thinking about Christmas just yet. And American friends, you have to get through Thanksgiving first! This is a poor distribution of holidays, if you ask me, although something to light the darkness of November is perhaps not the worst thing ever.

I'm trying to decide if i should make a weekly schedule for post topics like Sarah (I will jump on any chance to be more like Sarah). I used to do Mondays on the Margins for book reviews, but I mostly save those for the year-end post now. I could do the Whining Wednesday, but if I revive Surly Thursdays that's a lot of whining. I CAN produce that much whining without effort, but I probably should not.

For a loose Monday Margins thing, let's talk about celebrity book clubs. I have no problem with celebrity book clubs. Anything that gets people reading more is a good use of a platform. That said, I do have a really unattractive habit of assuming that the books might be simplistic, or formulaic or gimmicky, in order to appeal to a wide audience that contains some people who perhaps do not traditionally read a lot

Waaaaay back pre-marriage and kids, I worked in an adorable little bookstore in Toronto. I wandered by one day and went in, and it was so amazing I went home and sent an email saying I knew they probably weren't hiring but if they ever were I would love to be considered. And they hired me! I only got to work there for a couple of years before we moved to Ottawa, but it was a great experience. So one day I was behind the little counter and someone came in and asked for The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard. We may have had one copy, or none - it was a very small bookstore and couldn't carry a huge amount of stock, but we could usually order anything. So I sold it to her, or filled out an order slip, and went about my work day. Then another person came in and asked for the same book. Then another. I started to feel like I was being punked and looking around for a camera, and finally asked someone why everyone was asking for this book. She said "Oprah Winfrey recommended it 

Cool cool cool. A LITTLE HEADS UP WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE, OPRAH. Every bookstore was soon drowning in orders for this book. Yippee for the author. I think that after the first few books she started giving publishers a warning at least, so they could increase the print run.

Okay, I said I wasn't mad about it, but I am a little. There was an "Oprah Effect" that meant that publishers started choosing fiction based on what Oprah might like, and this included "moving, painful human stories" which could tend to the overblown and melodramatic and, frankly, I don't love the idea of publishers promoting or rejecting books based on a talk show host's whims. And then she cancelled her book club because it was apparently difficult for her to find books she wanted to share. Yes in all the fiction published everywhere there was nothing up to Oprah's exacting standards, *eye roll* I think she has a book club again, but after that it was kind of dead to me. 

ANYWAY. The Deep End of the Ocean was a perfectly fine book - not one I would consider a great book club entry, but fine. A friend said she wasn't having good luck with Reese's picks, and I scanned the list and the only books I had read were thrillers that, again, were fine (okay, one I hated) but not the kind of dense, chewy, possibly polarizing book I usually consider a suitable book club pick. I'm not a book snob! I read genre fiction extensively, I don't judge anyone for what they like to read, and there are different books for different readers. For book club, though, I have slightly more exacting standards 

Anyway AGAIN, in the past month I accidentally read two books that turned out to be featured in Jenna  Bush's Read With Jenna Book Club, and they both blew me away. One was The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, about the surveillance state taken to new extremes, where a brain implant meant to regulate sleep spies on your dreams and can lead to incarceration based on dreams that are assumed to prophesize violent acts. The other was The Names by Florence Knapp, which begins with a woman going to register her newborn son's name - he is to be named Gordon, after her abusive husband. The story then splits into three powerful narratives based on her choosing three different names, and how this affects her future and that of her two children. Both of these books had an actual physical effect on my breathing and heart rate. The reverberations of trauma to future generations, the arbitrary cruelty and powerlessness experienced by people in the carceral system, the way the smallest decisions can have an enormous impact - all explored with sharp, profound writing. 

So fine. I may periodically look at what Jenna is reading, or at least I won't try NOT to. Seems like Oprah has some pretty good picks in the long list on her website too. 

How do you feel about celebrity book clubs? If you're in a book club, are there any rules for what you read?