The ship Discovery, Antarctica, 1901
The Evil that is the Oprah’s Book Club Sticker
This past weekend I helped run a large yardsale, at which I discovered and purchased a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a book which I am apprehensive about due to its seemingly cliche romantic plot, but that I am going to give a try since I’ve heard so many good things about its author). It was lightly used and in good shape. That was all fine and good, except for one small detail—plastered onto the cover was the infamous Oprah’s Book Club sticker.
I removed the sticker with little difficulty, but there remained on the cover a dark, sticky residue that I knew would be irritating both when reading the book and when shelving it with other softbacks. So I set to work.
I scraped with my fingernails. I lightly applied water. I scraped some more. I rubbed it with a towel. I scraped some more. After I had wasted several minutes doing this, I gave up. The cover is still sticky and the residue is visible. Aside from that, my scraping and wetting led to the cover itself being scraped and damaged in several places. All because of that stupid sticker, which apparently had the adhesive power of superglue.
This leads to a deeper question. Why is Oprah’s sticker there in the first place? I’m not a fan of stickers of any type being put on the covers of books, but I especially loathe this one because of my utter lack of concern for Oprah’s opinion on what I should and shouldn’t read. A book should sell on its own merit, not because some absurdly rich, out-of-touch talk show queen says it’s worth buying. Most books put the celebrity endorsements on the back or on the inside of the dust jacket. Stick Oprah’s opinion there. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won a Nobel Prize for literature. That should be a big enough endorsement.
(Note: I’m not actually fuming about all this. This rant is more a joke than anything. But really, it is a bit stupid.)
50 Book Update
On the extremely unlikely chance that anyone has been actively following my 50 Book Challenge progress, fear not. I have been pretty silent on that count for a few weeks, but it is not because I haven’t been reading. I just haven’t really gotten around to writing any reviews lately. As soon as I finish That Hideous Strength (which should be soon indeed), I’ll be posting a double review of it and Perelandra. These will have been my sixteenth and seventeenth books. Sorry for the panic. Now you can sleep at night again.
Actually I suspect you can skip the first 8 if you just do the last one.
(via sierrafaye)
I read a sad case today of a young writer who had had her story rewritten into illiteracy by a so-called publisher, who then abused her in email when she wrote to complain. She wsn’t getting paid for her story — instead she was actually buying copies of the anthology to show people that she had…
(Source: howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com)
Well, that’s creepy.
Harry Clarke is one of my favourite artists - one of the very few that I collect (very lazily; I have two ink drawings and some pencil sketches by him).
None are as scarylovely as this.
—-
I have a book of Poe stories with these illustrations. I always thought they were really cool, but I didn’t know anything about the artist.
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (via fate-my-friend)
"All flesh is like grass and all it’s glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever."
— 1 Peter 1:24,25 (via workofself)
“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”
― Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction
