My Ideal Bookshelf
Thessaly La Force
(Ed), Jane Mount (Ill)
Category: Nonfiction:
Books & Reading; Art
Synopsis: Dozens
of writers, artists, chefs, and inventors share what is on their “ideal
bookshelf,” each of which is represented with a painting.
Date finished: 6
June 2013
Rating: ***½
Comments:
This is a brilliant idea. I love the idea. I couldn’t believe no one had thought of this
before. Readers love nothing more than to poke through someone else’s bookcase.
A single bookshelf says more about a person than most anything they actually say to you. The idea is so smart on so
many levels.
And yet, the book didn’t work for me.
Here’s the deal: I’m only interested in what people I know are reading. Of the 106 writers,
artists, chefs, etc. represented here, I was only familiar with 15 of them. And
I was not intimately familiar with any
of them. It became a joke with me. I’d turn the page, see another name I didn’t
know, look them up in the back for a brief bio (and I mean brief) and
invariably it would say, “short story writer.” This had to be 90% short story
writers—or founding members of Sonic Youth. The editor showed her bias in such
an obvious and naive way, that it narrowed her audience hugely. Now, maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’s an
Artist-with-a-capital-A, so names don’t matter to her as much as passion, but
she did want to sell books, didn’t she? Right?
Now, had this book been proposed by a bigger name in
publishing, and a name more connected with writers rather than “app designers”
(good heavens is that going to date this book in a few years), you could have
seen Stephen King and Maya Angelou and Gwyneth Paltrow (I don’t know why I
threw her name out there, she just seems like the bookish type). This could
have been a fabulous book. With the people used—God bless them—it was pretty
ho-hum. When will folks realize we don’t all live on the East Coast, that we’re
not all obsessed with pop culture, and that we don’t all have an i-device
sprouting out of our fingers or ears?
I enjoyed the paintings and appreciated that most of the
work there was in learning to do the lettering for the various spines. That
fascinated me. The accompanying text was too short, though. The blurbs read
like the editor, La Force, had asked for a few pages of text, and then she
ruthlessly cut and jimmied things until it fit in the space allotted. It’s what
editors do, but she was careless about it. Everybody’s text sounded exactly the
same, because she edited the voice out. The text was soulless and limp. And
since they were only allowed a certain amount of space, only a couple of the
books on each shelf were ever discussed. Excuse me, but wasn’t that sort of the point of the whole exercise?
It was interesting to see what showed up on shelves over and
over: The Elements of Style, Moby-Dick, Lolita, Jesus’ Son, The House Book, Bird by Bird, Infinite Jest,
as well as work by Updike, Didion, O’Connor, Wharton, Carver, and Lorrie Moore.
James Patterson’s story about watching a woman shoplift his book (page 142) is
almost worth the price of admission. I wrote down a few quotes that I enjoyed,
but I found it almost tragic how many writers wrote about their desire to
imitate other writers.
This book should have been done by Oprah! That would have
been…wow, I can’t even finish that sentence without having to sit down for a
minute. Not that I’m an Oprah-ite, just that her pull would have made this book
legendary. She could have brought in well-known writers and big time celebrities.
The folks represented would have appealed to more readers, and the audience
would have been expanded exponentially. (There are less than 30 reviews for
this book on Amazon.) As it is, it’s sort of a snapshot in time that feels
plastic and throw-away. It makes me sad that such a great idea failed so
spectacularly.
Would you recommend
this to a friend?
Maybe, but mostly just to get their take.
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