I Just Read a Book for Nothing
This week the best episode of South Park ever aired. It starts out with the boys reading The Catcher in the Rye. Their teacher warns them about all of the controversy surrounding that book and of course that just makes the kids super-excited to read it. “Whoa you are telling me this book is filthy and inappropriate and made the guy kill the king of hippies? Can we please read this now!?!” They go home and tear through the book and d
ecide it wasn’t worth the controversy and write their own raunchy book which becomes a national phenomenon leading up to the assassinations of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Kardashian.
It got me thinking about this book I read that I was really psyched about and it was flat out boring. It was one of those books that I’ve heard all kinds of good things about it and how exciting it is supposed to be. It just did nothing for me for whatever reason. I won’t go into details about which book it is because it really doesn’t matter. People enjoy it and that’s great and I don’t see much reason to rain on their parade about it but it got me thinking about how sometimes the legends behind books and authors become just as intriguing (or sometimes more intriguing) than the writing. We all love a crazy author story. This book that I read was kind of like that. I heard all of these crazy rumors about the author and while it got me to purchase a copy of the book, I felt kind of betrayed. And I wonder if the book would have been more successful if I hadn’t come in with expectations and been able to take the book on its own terms. Anyways while I won’t recommend the book to you I do suggest taking a look at this episode.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/267108
I’m so curious about what the book is, Carly. Spill the beans! Unless you don’t wanna, which you obviously don’t. But really, I’m just curious what it is about this book that you found boring while others seem to like it. This seems to be an important psychological thing, why we’re attracted to the literature we are. For example, I’ll give you a book that I know I’m supposed to love but I only liked: White Noise by Don DeLillo. I appreciated the cultural/metaphorical statement being made in the book, but the journey the book took me through to get there was just okay in my mind. A professor with a family who is unhappy. The book is all about watching this professor become more and more neurotically unhappy. Like I said, interesting on a philosophical level, but something about the experience of reading it was tedious. Toni Morrison novels on the other hand fascinate me every time (with the exception of Paradise, which I had trouble starting and so skipped to read Sula). Maybe it’s a matter of language/sentence structure. I don’t know, but I always feel a little guilty when I read something I’m not impressed by when everyone else love it.