Watching You Watching Us

Last week while at work I watched (read: subjected to) an episode of Oprah dealing with her revived book club. The first book up, and the only one really interesting to me, was One Hundred Years of Solitude. I had read some of the book the first semester back in school. I had had to stop when the semester really heated up and just haven't gotten around to picking it back up and finishing it yet.

What surpsrised me was Oprah's spiel about the book. She talked about how it was Toni Morrison's favorite book and how the pop singer Shakira is good friends with Gabo - Gabriel Garcia Marquez's nickname. (I haven't a clue what this has to do with whether the book is good or not.) Also, she commented on how she had to read the book in three long stretches. She indicated surprise that the white housewives on her show were able to read the book in smaller increments. Also surprising, as she sequed into the next book she commented that the next book would be much easier than One Hundred Years of Solitude. This shocked me because it seemed she was saying that because the book was so hard she was surprised her audience had finished it. Why would a talk show host recommend books that she didn't think her audience could read?

Part of the show was Oprah meeting with some all white housewife bookclub in Arizona or somewhere. They echoed Oprah's comment about it being a hard book. One of them said she had done a character study prior to reading the book. Oprah asked where dhe had gathered the information for this and the lady responded, "On oprah.com !"

The evils of sub-genres

Personally I dislike genre-fication- black writers, latin-American writers, female writers, gay writers, Chinese gay female writers, etc., etc. I find it denegrating. Reviews read "a great female writer" as if it is good for a female, but white males (such as myself) have some sort of higher mark. It ties into my dislike of gender studies and such in literary criticsm.

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* According to the Oregonian Franzen had considered turning down Oprah's show. He also told an interviewer at Powells.com that "[Oprah's] picked some good books but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself ..." Usually ellipsed, the rest of the quote read "even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight." In the end I believe it was actually Oprah that had revoked the invite.