A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire

by Janice A. Radway

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird . Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, History, American History, Biography, The United States Of America, Cultural

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Sonja · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is all about how middlebrow literature is more absorbing and, in a sense, meaningful than the so-called high brow texts. Anyone who likes to read should check this out -- it's interesting to think about something as abstract and subjective as "literary taste" and the whole idea of allowing an institution to choose for you what books you should read. The implications of this are enormous!

I got a lot out of this but I thought it was going to be more about how people "believe" what they read, and how groups like the Book of the Month Club or even the recent craze with Oprah's Book Club are manifestations of the fact that people don't like to think for themselves, or to work hard and labor through difficult texts. But then again... maybe I need to have more faith in humanity. This book was not about what I thought it would be, but rather tended more toward singing the praises of middlebrow literature from the privileged perspective of academia... ironically, this vantage point still valorizes high brow text in that only from "up there" can one "look down" and feel refreshed by this "other" literature.

[James Denison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What a book. Radway explicates taste within the context of the culture industry without demeaning its consumers - a rare feat. A sterling example of how to write about mass culture intelligently but without arrogance.

[Judine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, Radway is able to write theory in a way that makes sense. However, I would have liked to see her connect more to the middle section of the book like she does in parts one and three. The first person style makes for easier reading.

[モーリー · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent combination of anthropology, personal experience, and book history. I aspire to being able to write such a masterful book about my own work in the history of authorship and literary marketplaces.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it interesting, particularly the origin study, but the book was encumbered with some academic language about "incipient," "liminal," "agency," and "gendered" and so on. When it reflected on the author's own experience in the offices of BOMC or as a member, some of this dropped away. Although I haven't read much Pierre Bourdieu it seemed to owe a good deal to his critique of French and American "bourgeois" and their lesser values.

In the late 60s -- just a few years after Radway's reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, Marjorie Morningstar, and Gods, Graves and Scholars, I was a BOMC member and received the bonus of Durant's Story of Civilization, as well as reading New Industrial State, Iberia, The Pentagon of Power, Collapse of the Third Republic, Gandhi's Truth, J C Furnas history. Was this "middle class desire?"

My "membership" was no announcement or affiliation. I signed up as a way to get access to current books (and Durant) at a reasonable price. The books weren't for display.

I followed the Saturday Review of Books, was frequently at the library. I also was in a club for Doubleday Anchor paperbacks which introduced me me to Malinowski and other anthropologists, and a classic reprints club that offered Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, Franklin, Walter Scott, Austen, Brontes, Hardy, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and a host of similar 19th and early 2oth century books. In addition Time Life had a paperback club which yielded Eastern Approaches, Memento Mori, Three who Made a Revolution, Kabloona, The Edge of Day, Preface to Morals, I, Claudius, and other books of worth. Time bought BOMC and is something of the villain in this book.

Highbrow critics would have had me read Ulysses (I did receive Portrait of the Artist from Time) and Woolf, maybe some other 20th century Modernist writers and Europeans and except for Eliot, Pound, Sartre and French playwrights, it didn't happen. True, if the writing was overly complex (Finnegan) or stream of consciousness (Sound and Fury) I was put off.

I worked my way through Twain, Dresiser, Cather, Bellow, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, some Faulkner, Roth from the library shelves. some of these I'm sure get branded as "middlebrow" -- Cather and Buck typically were, but sometimes that seems like a synonym for books "actual people actually buy, read and talk about this stuff." Memorable characters, coherent story lines, interesting social themes without leftist preaching, these things seem to disqualify as "litrachoor."

Of course I was in my teens then.

The same critique of being middlebrow and "aspirational" was leveled at Brittanica "Great Books" which I actually read almost all by my mid-20s, and I am pretty sure, the critics didn't.

Radway makes the point that BOMC chose books that selection committee felt personally, and judged readers would.

[Kelly Frost · Rating 3 out of 5]

Radway's personal tone and first person account really hooked me at first. I was looking to read her works on audience but decided to read this "just for the fun of it." However after the first chapter I stopped really caring about the book of the month club and academia in general--other things just seem much more important.

I'm sure she has good things to say and I like her honesty about being both author and subject in this book. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but I doubt it.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

This had a whole lot of essays that said a whole lot of nothing for pages and pages. Apparently, no one ever told these writers about getting to the point.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good look at Book-of-the-Month Club and the construction of one woman's taste in books