Book Therapy
Have you joined The Readers' Subscription? It's a book club, and, because the reply cards go to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, I assume that it's part of the BOMC empire. It seems odd now, but I "belonged" to the Book of the Month Club for a while, long ago. I'm still a "member" of the Quality Paperback Book Club; it's useful every now and then - though not nearly so often as I thought it was twenty years ago - to have the softbound edition of some big, noisy book that's physically closer to the clothbound original than paperbacks usually are. Both BOMC and QPB(C) are broadband outfits, aimed at the consumers of regular books. (By "regular" I mean to exclude the works of Tim la Haye and Jerry Jenkins.) The Readers' Subscription, in contrast, targets a more earnest group. There are no beach books, few self-helps and how-tos, and hardly any recent fiction. Instead, there is philosophy galore. This may sound sarcastic, and I suppose that, despite my protestations, I mean it to be, but The Readers' Subscription is aimed at people who believe in serious books that will explain the meaning of life, or at least the difficulty of finding the meaning of life. I hereby confess that I used to believe in them. The faithful evidently constitute a large enough market to attract Camp Hill's interest.
Note that this is not a club but a "subscription" - I hope that whoever dreamed that one up has gone on to a richly rewarded career in marketing. Its monthly offerings are published in a booklet called The Griffin. The cover of the Spring 2005 edition advertises a book about Spinoza. Actually, it is two books, yours for just under sixty dollars. Are we sufficiently serious? The cover art features the philosopher's name in a spindly, autographic script, superimposed on the image of a worn old book with a highly embossed cover that, if it's at all real, probably contains pretty poems, not philosophy. The background is an arrangement of tantalizingly illegible columns of type - I daren't even speak of "words." I don't know how it is that the spirit of Mary McCarthy descended upon me this morning, but I can't even look at this month's Griffin without seeing that is is literate pornography. Like real pornography, it distills pleasure from complication. You have not read a word, much less a word of Spinoza, but holding The Griffin in your hand, poised to open it, you feel good about your brain. If only you had the time....!
I'm not laughing. I'm writing this as a kind of therapy, because the Spring 2005 Griffin is chock-a-block with temptation. The Spinoza offering, a two-volume set by Israeli writer Yirmiyahu Yovel, claims that Spinoza is the true father of the Enlightenment, an argument that I seem to recall as the subject of a recent book by Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Mr Yovel's books, however, appear to be appealingly slim. (Memo to self: Expatiate on the paradox of slim books.) Then there is another pair of books, consisting of Ali and Nino, the famous Azerbaijani novel, and a biography of its author, whose name at birth was not Kurban Said but Lev Nussimbaum, "a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany." The author's adventurous and improbable career has been the appeal of Ali and Nino since its appearance in English a decade or so ago - whether or not the novel is actually worth reading. Now that I'm fiddling with Turkish, this package has taken on a real glow, but the piles of books in the blue room remind me of what is all too likely to happen. On page 7, there are three tempters, one about Mary Lamb, the co-author of Tales from Shakespear who - I certainly didn't know this - stabbed her mother to death; another that retails a "sensational" Victorian case of murder; and Opera: The Art of Dying. "Might opera," The Griffin editors inquire, "teach us how to die? This provocative work brings together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons of living and dying that opera imparts." Very tempting! What could be grander than learning how to spice up a fatal mugging with "Niun mi tema"? Turning the page, I am confronted by none other than William Gaddis, the famously difficult writer that Jonathan Franzen, intentionally or not, convinced me that I don't have to read. But these are such attractive Penguins. Turn! Oh, no! Another famously difficult novelist (isn't he?), Halldór Laxness! How much longer will I be able to keep the polymathic reputation that no one who hasn't read at least one of this author's Icelandic sagas deserves? Panting with inadequacy, I glance at the final pages of the booklet without taking anything in. I'm bushed!
Thank you; I feel much better now. And I've sent this month's mailing from The Reader's Subscription down the chute, remembering with guilty pleasure that I've ordered the "new" Ian Rankin from Amazuke.
