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Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins
rebeccacider's review against another edition
4.0
This is a pretty neat analysis of how Booker-winning novels about bibliophiles, Miramax costume dramas, chick lit, big business booksellers, and the Oprah Book Club peddle literature as self-help guide and status marker. For an academic text, it was fun and accessible, and I was deeply amused by Collins' analysis of the Booker-winner bibliophile novels as *category* fiction on the same level as westerns or sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels.
Questions remain: is the emergence of feel-good, consumerist literary culture really new? What remains of literary culture that doesn't fit into the Oprah/Booker/Book Lust mold? What about the formative effect of high school English class on literary reading? Do readers of genre fiction relate to books in a different way than devotees of the literary or faux-literary? And where does gender fit into all this (fluffy chick lit versus serious Booker winner as gendered categories)? I wish Collins had posed these questions explicitly, but as it was, I was left with plenty of food for thought.
Questions remain: is the emergence of feel-good, consumerist literary culture really new? What remains of literary culture that doesn't fit into the Oprah/Booker/Book Lust mold? What about the formative effect of high school English class on literary reading? Do readers of genre fiction relate to books in a different way than devotees of the literary or faux-literary? And where does gender fit into all this (fluffy chick lit versus serious Booker winner as gendered categories)? I wish Collins had posed these questions explicitly, but as it was, I was left with plenty of food for thought.
flappermyrtle's review against another edition
4.0
This book provides the reader with a cross-section of literaty presence in popular culture. He makes a strong case for the current link between literature and lifestyle, as well as addressingthe cine-literary nature of the current cultural field. The final chapter, however, felt slightly out of place as the vocabulary becomes quite subjective and judging when he speaks of literary novels about literature/reading, which is understandable but unfortunate in this otherwise very interesting research. Also annoying but beside the point: slight syntactical slips and an incorrect use of cursive that are ubiquitous enough to be noticed.
iriswindmeijer's review against another edition
4.0
A very fascinating insight in the contemporary reading culture, where he discusses the big-box bookstore, Oprah's Book Club, film adaptations, and popular literary texts as the new structure of literary pleasure. The book provided me with a lot of background between literature and lifestyle.
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