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Reaching to the converted | page 1, 2
To which, let's pose a difficult question: So what? Certain publishing companies might be making pots of money from the Book Club phenomenon, and certain authors -- some of whom richly deserve it -- might've been catapulted into an incredible pitch of wealth and stardom. But the great, eldritch power of literature isn't in books themselves, or in the base process of reading them. It's in the spark of abiding curiosity that honest writing can kindle in you, if you're prepared to trust it and to follow it halfway into its own premises. Literature -- even bad, honest literature -- changes you once you've experienced it well and fully. It makes you restive and always slightly hungry. It makes you feel not bigger, but incalculably smaller, because you're forced to realize that there are entire worlds -- locked up in distorted bits and fragments -- in more books than you'll ever have time to open. Also Today Silence the snobs! But while Oprah's club members are reading a lot of Oprah books, there's no sign that they're branching off to read anything else in any great profusion -- no fiction, nonfiction or magazines. Apparently, all they're curious to read is what Oprah suggests to them. "It won't take you a long time," Oprah assured her audience upon launching Breena Clarke's novel. "I'm sure you're going to enjoy it as a family drama and also as an intimate glimpse into a time and place that we don't often hear about. It's set around 1920 ... 1925, in Georgetown in D.C. ... If you are in D.C., you are really going to love it because you'll know all the landmarks." Clarke's current Amazon ranking is 35. Meanwhile, not a single, solitary person has ever ordered William W. Brown's classic novel "Clotel, or, the President's Daughter," a family drama written in 1853 by a black abolitionist author -- and set, like Clarke's story, amid the landmarks of Washington. There's a new edition due to come out any day now -- and while Oprah is currently flogging a licensing deal with Starbucks, purveyors of haute-middlebrow specialty products to D.C. and the world, good money says that not 1 percent of her club members will ever hear of the publication of "Clotel," from her or from anyone else. Brown's book is old, unfashionable. It's full of archaic expressions and locutions. It doesn't address any contemporary issues. It's hard. And unless Oprah herself decides to hoist it before the world, it won't exist for her club in any real sense. Still, compared to Clarke's book, Brown's is a masterpiece -- and as someone recently said, "It won't take you a long time." What takes a long time is getting through the next dozen interesting books, and then the dozens after that. And once you start down that path, you quickly discover that you don't have much time to waste on TV talk shows anymore, or any great incentive to pay attention when celebrities try to dictate your opinions about the world.
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