Boring Books I Don't Want to Read
By SM Shrake on Oct 5, 2005 in SM Shrake | Comments
When I sit down to write, I often am gripped by "monomania." Let me tell everything I can about this one narrow subject. Movie lines. Redheads. Being a Scorpio. I clearly need to develop my writing abilities to allow for some weaving in and around more than one topic. Show that my powers of expression wear bifocals or trifocals or quadrafocals, not a monocle.
I usually hold my articles to a succinct 750 words, because I have what I call "adult-onset ADHD," and I just assume the rest of you do as well. As many of you know, my life was started over for me a few years ago, and ever since then, I find it hard to justify sitting around reading. I see it as decadent. My book-world friends know this, and they understand and respect it.
The height of authorial hubris and readerial oppression, it seems to me, are these sexed-up, deceptively packaged, overmarketed neo-monographs that pepper the bookstores nowadays. They're all LONG and they are invariably categorized as General World History.
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I don't know who the target audience is for these dressed-up dissertations, whose mousy academic roots are showing despite their prominent placement at the bookstore.
Who says, "Gee, I'd like to spend a few weeks learning more about coal? Spring is coming, but rather than go play on the lawn I'll stay indoors and read about the 'world-changing' color of the shirt I'm wearing."
Granted, some of these mono-subjects are not too bad. Maybe a coffee fan or a caviar fan or a toothless old opium fiend would appreciate a monograph about that substance . . . I don't think I would, and I like coffee and caviar (and I'd like to know where to score some opium.) These dry tomes with their aspirations to global importance and literary immortality all carry the scent of the lame gift: You mentioned you like potatoes, so I got you this book called The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World.
Like, I visualize some spazz walking around the grocery store getting really interested in each product, and lo and behold, he can find a full-length book with grand claims that "re-view" history based on just that foodstuff! You can see the world afresh through the lens of corn, or expand your mind with a lengthy embarkation into the sweet, sweet world of sugar, or roll up your eyelids and immerse yourself in the spongy and delicious new intellectual universe of the banana. Don't forget to read a book about one of the best fishes out there, the fascinating and scrumptious cod! Please, please, let there be a book about scrod, too!
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What's next? Stuff like this?:
- Dust: A World History
- Fingernail Clippers: The Overlooked Key to History
- Caulk: The Goo That Holds the Whole World Together, Literally
- Steak in a Tube: How Sausage Changed the Course of Human Civilization
...?
One hint to the abject nature of these mono-doorstops is that when you look one of them up on Amazon, the upsell suggestions aren't for other history books, they're mostly for other, even more boring books about whatever quantity is named in the title. Stock up on your salt books for the long cold winter!
So, here I am at the end of another screed, and once again I've made a hypocrite out of myself by just critiquing a single subject: books about a single narrow subject that should've stayed overlooked by the publishing world. I hate reading books of all kinds, though. In that I'm a pretty equal-opportunity Philistine.
Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.
