Broadsheet

I wish someone would give Oprah her comeuppance. she was a thousand times more accountable than his lame ass over that entire debacle.

 

Eeb -I really thought she ate a huge slice of humble pie in backpeddling her support of Frey. She pretty much groveled a personal apology, which is a lot more than Frey or his publishers did, and I'm not that huge an Oprah fan to begin with.

 

Book reading has always been thought of as a noble endeavor. That was great idea back when we had editors and publishing houses that cared. Now I wish somebody would just admit it, there is a heck of a lot of crappy books out there.

I'm getting the feeling that it is cheaper and cheaper to publish and market books these days.

 

Cham is right, there is quite a bit of published crap out there. I attribute this directly to the fact that our society is far dumber than it was 25 years ago.

 

tfg - I absloutely agree with you. I look back at the stuff I read in high school and college: Kafka, Barthes, Brautigan, Foucalt, Roth, Camus....There are so few unique voices out there today. Oh, Roth is still around, isn't he? Maybe Gunter Grass, AS Byatt, or Alice Munro too. But as much as I like a good beach read, I've really had enough of Tom Wolfe and David Foster Wallace. And let's not even talk about the dumbing down that is "chick lit". Spare me.

 

I'm actually going to disagree with all of you, respectively, of course. Hyperbole has always been a part of memior writing, at least as far back as the days of John Smith. Truman Capote constantly did the exact same thing in his essays. In one essay he would attribute an action or wittisism to an other, and then ten years later would claim the action for himself in another essay. the important difference was that capote was a genious with the english language, so who cares (he was also a sad and pathetic little man, but that is a different matter). Frey's book was a crappy self-help book about personal awesomeage.

Nobody would have cared if Oprah had not pushed this on her faithful followers, as MissDomestic cleverly phrased it, a self-help bible. The biggest problem is not what these people write, its that people are being told that crappy books are going to change their lives for the better. And who is accountable for that? Frey? No. Oprah is! No matter what happens with accuracy in memiors over all over of this, the Oprah Winfrey self-help crappy bible book club is going to continue to choke out well written literary books from the best seller lists and negatively effect the quality of what is available on the market.

who care about frey? someone please so something about oprah.

 

Eeeb - We're talking about 2 different things here. Putting aside the fact that Frey is a schmuck, I put him on a par with Jason Blair. Fabrication is not hyperbole. Anyway, enough of him. I completely agree that whatever Oprah has done for books sales, she has done ten times more than that to lower the bar on good literature. Her audience couldn't handle the truth (sorry Jack Nicholson). Publishers are sinking to her level. Now, if say, Jon Stewart started a book club....maybe we'd have something!

 

I don't put Frey and Blair on par with each other. Blair was supposed to be a journalist. Frey's book was written as a cheesy novel, and was unable to sell it as such. a publisher, knowing the market for oprah books, told him she could sell it as a memior. frey, who had alreay mortgaged his house to take the time to write the book, went along for the ride. besides, i think there should be more latitude for memiors than for jounalism (not completely, but there is room for arguement there). I just think it is important and relivent to point out that all arrows point to the Oprah book club. His book was an effect, Oprah was the cause. her taking him to task for what she created didn't impress me at all.

regardless, the page looks great, by the way.

 

Broadsheet, I beg to differ with you on Oprah's fiction selections. Back in 99 I was taking a train back and forth into DC. I ended up plowing through a number of her bookclub selections. She has some real classics on her fiction list:

http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/fiction/oprahbyyear.html

I'd highly recommend The Reader, White Oleandar and The Pilot's Wife. If you want to be blown out the water try The Book of Ruth or The Rapture of Canaan. All well written and they are all page turners. You will notice Oprah as a few of the classics on her list as well with Buck, Tolstoy, Steinbeck and McCullers.

 

Cham - sorry. A little thing called work kept me from responding promptly. I looked at the list, and you're right - there are some classics on there. Of the roughly fifty books on her list, I would consider about 10 classics, another 10 solid good books, and the rest cater to her audience - females, housewives, and black females. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that her media power is so pervasive, that she is actually able to influence, if not dictate, the publishing industry and what they think is the taste of the general public, which it's not. God forbid she ever embraces NASCAR.....