When I was a senior in college, Jonathan Franzen's book The Corrections was published, and Oprah chose it for her book club. Franzen made a big deal about the book being published with the "Oprah's Book Club" seal on it, and apparently didn't think that Oprah's readers were literary enough to understand his work. (Never mind that the book centers on a Midwestern family struggling with the heady days of the late nineties and a few family secrets.) I bought a copy of it while I was living in Japan about a year later, where the book was published without Oprah's seal of approval. I still think it's one of the best books I've read.
Denver is in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave, and when I was there last week, I escaped to the Barnes and Noble store for about an hour to cool down. I was all set to buy a copy of The Bourne Identity, because I love the movies so much, but bought a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude instead, after reading on the back that it is "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." (I'm about one-fifth of the way into it, and will reserve my judgment until I'm finished, as I found The Hours a failure to live up to its hype until I got to the last third, when it turned into something amazing.)
The B&N had one copy of the book on the shelf and another stack of copies on a "Summer Reading" table. I noticed that these had the Oprah seal on them. Ugh. Back I went to the shelf for the Oprah-free edition. Though I am not sure One Hundred Years of Solitude is "the great novel of the Americas" it is supposed to be, I like it enough so far to be considering ordering Love in the Time of Cholera from Amazon.com. Unfortunately, my only two choices for editions are one that announces the book is "now a major motion picture" and the other that bears the Oprah seal. (Did she pick two books by this guy? Or are they just putting the seal on all the author's books after one gets picked or what?)
I own two other books that possess the "major motion picture" line: The Hours and a collection of Philip K. Dick stories that included Minority Report. I bought both of them in Japan because they were the only copies available in English. I own zero books with that Oprah seal. This is America! In exchange for my $10.17, shouldn't I be able to get a copy of the book free of both pop-culture reminders so I can feel free to pretend that I never buy books because they get made into movies (like, say, The Bourne Identity) and that I never watch Oprah?
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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