Favourite Week: Book Clubs

Book clubs. Glorious book clubs. I love book clubs. I belong to two (technically three if you count the one on Goodreads, but I am sooooo delinquent with that one you can pretend I never said nuttin’ ’bout that one) and I love every minute of it. Even those scrambled minutes the night before when I am trying to finish a book in time. Or, you know, the five minutes before book club begins. I’ve never done that though. At least not more than once.Book clubs. Why do I love book clubs? As a reader, I love finding and reading books to read that I might not cross paths with otherwise. Plus, I love discussing books with others. And I love to talk about books too. (Shut up, Jean. There are others in the book club who want to talk too. Note: I have gotten better about ‘sharing the floor’,  just so you know. It’s simply that I have lots of things I want to talk about and ask others. That’s all. No, really. It isn’t all about me. It’s all about the book. Well, mostly. I mean, the majority of the time… Okay, I’m going to shut up now.)

As a writer, I love to find out what others thought of a book. Did they like it? Hate it? How did this part make them feel? The author broke the rules over here, what was your reaction as a reader? What we the slow parts for you? Where did you get totally engrossed? Etc. Etc. I learn soooo much in book club about readers and their fickle tastes. It’s wonderful!

Do you belong to a book club? What’s your favourite part?

The Oprah Machine

From Publishers Lunch February 29^th, 2008:

“Following Oprah’s enthusiastic endorsement Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH has added another 3.45 million copies in print, “the record for the most copies ever shipped by Penguin Group USA in a four-week period.” That’s on top of an initial shipment of 776,000 copies in advance of the Oprah announcement. BN buyer Jules Herbert says “for the first four weeks on sale [it] is our bestselling Oprah’s Book Club title.” The publisher says over 500,000 people have registered for the 10-week webinar that begins next Monday night.”

The Oprah machine never ceases to amaze me. She says something is great and all these people blindly follow her. She would make a great cult leader. Or maybe she already is. After all, she is charismatic, has people giving her money (Angel Network), taking her word as truth and more. Lately, I haven’t been able to watch her show because she has these amazing people on and then cuts them off and talks over them and puts words in their mouths or interrupts to talk about herself and her experiences when she initiated the subject—or a related one—which was supposed to be about her guest and what they do. Why does she even bother to have guests on her show? She could just ask herself questions. Plus the vast amounts of product placement and commercials and self promotion turns me off. There is no longer any content outside of Oprah and her products.

While I commend Oprah for encouraging North America to become more literate and is helping authors out by placing her little book club sticker on their books and instantly launching books onto bestseller lists, I also feel uncomfortable. Mostly because she has this great pulling power. Her current pick is about changing your life and leading with purpose, which is good. Many people are searching for purpose—myself included—yet there is something about this that doesn’t quite jive. Maybe it is her commercialism. Maybe it is the fact that she is a celebrity who can no longer bear the thought of sharing a bar of soap with another person. In other words, who is she to tell us how to live? She thinks we should all be spanx wearing, purposeful life driven consumers. If we are busy trying to emulate her and be all purposeful and enlightened yet trying to buy, buy, buy, what is going to happen? I think we are going to actually push ourselves further away from who we are truly supposed to be.

At the end of the Oprah day, we are going to be less the vision that she is trying to lure us towards, because in the end, Oprah just wants us to consume what she’s peddling.