inthelouvre.org » Sunday Salon: Booksnobbery

Sunday Salon: Booksnobbery

11

May

'08


The Sunday Salon I work in a bookstore and every day I am faced with some form of book snobbery. It comes in many forms - customers who scoff at those browsing historical romance, people who are shocked that an employee has never heard of Thackery, and others. (A note on that Thackery: at my corporate bookstore job, a man told me I was wasting my English degree simply because I’d never read Vanity Fair.)

Of all the faces of booksnobbery, though, what amuses me most are customers who ask for books they know next to nothing about but get mad at us when we can’t find them. “It’s a classic,” they say, “but I can’t tell you the author or what it’s about; I’m not even sure I can discern the difference between fiction and nonfiction. But you - the bookseller - have never heard of it? You can’t find it? Oh my God! What kind of bookstore are you people running?” It makes my day go by much more pleasantly when those customers call or come in.

An article I came across recently, “You Are Not Your Bookcase,” discusses the books we put in our e-profiles and how we think they define us - and how others define us because of them. Would someone put He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt next to Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey? If they didn’t, would it be more because it wasn’t expected or because they didn’t want to be associated with a self-help relationship book despite the fact that it proved extremely beneficial to them? That this kind of booksnobbery exists is not a surprise.

Take my Thackery customers, for example - the one who was appalled at the bookseller who didn’t know who the author was, the other who was appalled at me because I’d never read a certain title of his. With certain levels of education or interest, people expect you to have every “classic” under your belt. I was an English major and I collect books, therefore my friends look at me when a Jeopardy category deals with authors or books. It doesn’t matter what genre, time period, nationality or theory the category presents - I know everything! So they say.

Why? Why is this expected? It’s not just English majors or booksellers, mind you, it’s everyone. Why in Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read did one student lose his social standing simply because he admitted that he hadn’t read Hamlet? I sometimes don’t understand the societal pressures to read what we “should” read - Shakespeare, Dickens, Harper Lee, whatever; sometimes I get an inkling of where they come from and why it’s important that they’re there, but I always question it when I come across it in my day-to-day life. Why am I expected to have read these certain titles? Does the fact that I don’t care make people think that I really do care, that I’m hiding behind my reading insecurities by saying “it really doesn’t matter what I’ve read or what I choose to read as long as I enjoy it”?

So I’m starting my first week taking part of The Sunday Salon by talking about a story no one told me to read; in fact, I judged this book based on its title (just as I’m not afraid to admit I haven’t read Hamlet, I can tell you that I buy books based on covers and titles). It’s a selection from Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, a collection of “perfectly shaped studies of human connection and disconnection” (from the back cover). I don’t normally like short stories collections, even though short stories are the only kinds of stories I can write, but I read another one by Ben Fountain recently (Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) and fell to the floor in ecstatic happiness after I was done. I’m hoping that this one will have the same effect, because that totally ruled.

It is hard to catch on, hard to enjoy. The writing style is, well, different… First person present, then second person past, then suddenly we’re experiencing a disaster of epic proportions, but then everything’s fine again. This morning I woke up early and just as soon found myself in a long, stressful day at work; we are tired as the turtle says. Perhaps this book will fare better over the next week. I can definitely see myself enjoying it, but for now I’m having a hard time keeping my brain on the same page as my eyes.

This week I’ve been working on George MacDonald’s collection of fairy tales. I intend to read it thoughtfully so it’s taking me longer than expected. I’ve also been interested in the French Revolution (thanks to that Marie-Therese book I read recently) and a book called Finding Your Roots by Jeanne Westin, which besides being very old (pre-Internet) is helping me put together a family history. I’ve also recently acquired an interesting look at video game culture (Power-Up by Chris Kohler) and a much-coveted hardback copy of John Connolly’s Nocturnes (evidently this makes it the UK edition, as it wasn’t released in hardback in the US or Canada). I would really like to get into these soon.

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