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

Janice A. Radway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1997

Janice Radway suggests that the varied collection of books recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club over the years has been instrumental in formulating middlebrow literary taste in America and in defining the desires of the middle class. Here is her passionate exploration of reading, literary professionals, and the character of culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A virtual self-parody of obfuscation and solipsism in cultural studies. Radway (Literature/Duke Univ.) writes that she has spent much of her career mulling ``the distance I had travelled between a small tract house in suburban New Jersey . . . and a lectern in front of a literature class.'' Radway takes this self-indulgent vision of scholarship as her license to inflate a sentimental interest in the Book-of-the-Month Club into a needlessly mystified ``ethnography'' of it. Her history of the club's creation of a middle-brow reading appetite is relatively informative if, like everything else here, overlong. But because her contemporary ``fieldwork'' approaches the club as an arcane text or exotic tribe, rather than a perfectly intelligible business enterprise, she endlessly worries the relationship between its literary and commercial goals into equivocal blather, such as, ``Decisions about books at the club were always pegged to a highly elaborated conception of book buying and book reading.'' That is to say, ``multiple planes of the literary field . . . were structured according to . . . a planar logic that foregrounded the discreteness and particularity of domains and forms of expertise.'' It will be clear to anyone but Radway that the club is just a marketing scheme with a pretty simple taste-mongering shtick, run, to judge even by her flattering portrayal, by people who sell books, not literature. But Radway is lost in breathless close readings of editorial memos, and cut-and-paste applications of cultural theory--not to mention her affection for the staff and misty memories of young book-loving. More intriguing than any book club's mail-order stratagems is the question of how books like this get sold--to Ivy League departments in the form of dissertations, grant-makers (the Guggenheim in this case), and university presses. (9 illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

A Feeling for Books, though not at every turn satisfying, does identify an array of vital issues pertaining to the formation of taste, collective and individual. Some readers will wish for stronger links to our cultural moment; others for more extended personal reflection on how a passionate reader of popular works became a scholar necessarily critical of such naive consumption. But no one who finishes Radway's study will ever again scan the club's enticing ads blindly. They will henceforth understand just how such an organization reads its would-be readers. There is reading, in other words, and there is reading--and somewhere, too, there is the chinking of the cash register. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Sven Birkerts

A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire is more personal than Dr. Radway's previous work, weaving her own history into that of the book club. And it turned out to be more sympathetic than she expected to what detractors have long labeled the club's `middlebrow' taste. -- Chronicle of Higher Education

The most interesting things about this book are its problems ... What makes the book at once more ambitious, distinctive and problematic is that Radway frames her study with a kind of intellectual and social autobiography. In Part I she describes her time spent with the Book-of-the-Month Club in the late 1980's ... In Part 2 she recaptures how some of the club's selections ... affected her when she read them as a girl and tries to understand the content of middlebrow culture through her present rereading of them. -- The New York Times Book Review, Fred Miller Robinson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807823570
• ISBN-13: 978-0807823576
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,607,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, but has some problems, May 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Hardcover)

A Feeling for Books is an interesting collection of thoughts on the history of the Book of the Month Club and on Radway's personal evolution as a reader and scholar. But... it needed editing. Must she document every circuitous and irrelevant observation that occurs to her? This is probably a fine practice in academic writing, but in the personal narrative portions of the book she was unfocused. The book suffers from a somewhat schizo-feeling due to Radway's dual purposes of historical account and personal observation, but she is well aware of this (the reader is warned at the outset). It is not that these two areas of focus don't complement each other in some ways and lead to a rather unorthodox narrative, but the format did lead me wonder if I should even apply questions of enjoyability to the book. Academic reading is not meant to be pleasurable (or so Radway says), and this book is certainly full of scholarly language, but Radway has such sympathy and fellow-feeling for the pleasure-reader that I think she was trying to elicit a pleasurable reading experience. How did the academic community receive this book? ...For me, the most interesting observations arose through the author's interactions with the BOMC editors circa late 1980s. Their enthusiastic readings and quirky classifications of books (self-referential, inwardly-focused fiction is deemed "autistic") are well worth reading about. One last observation: the book could have used appendices with complete lists of the BOMC main and alternate selections from founding to the present, and perhaps a list of all past judges/editors.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and revealing, but neither tight no rigorous, March 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Hardcover)

An erudite yet bold and powerfully immediate report on the BOMC's origin and development over six decades, A Feeling for Books is also an intimate document, poignantly tracing the author's relationship to the Club from her adolescence to her maturity. Because Radway is a fine researcher, a skillful reader, and a seasoned introspective, each aspect of her project succeeds on its own terms. But juxtaposed or, more problematically, superimposed, the yields of her various ends, ideas, and methods are neither commensurable nor mutually supportive. Recurrent "lumping" and intermittent incoherencies threaten to defeat Radway's purposes, inviting at least partial scepticism about her hard-won evidence and beautifully teased-out arguments. The reader and the author would have been better served by a division of this work into two books, one a disciplined cultural inquiry into the essence of persistent, unresolved conflicts in the publishing industry, the other a memoir devoted to the discovery and synthesis of the author's own values in a world of flux.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Heavy, November 21, 2006

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Philip Leetch - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Paperback)

I found the book heavy-going. Points are hammered home and I could not help wishing the book were much shorter. I do not think I as a reader would have lost much if there had been less detail.