A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire [Paperback]

Janice A. Radway (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807848301 | ISBN-13: 978-0807848302 | Publication Date: August 18, 1999

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.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

It is the best book I know on the mind altering powers of reading for pleasure.

American Quarterly

Essential reading for scholars interested in the history of the book and popular culture.

American Literature

Radway has written one of the most important books in this decade.

Libraries and Culture

Ambitious and engrossing, and it leaves us with much to ponder.

Washington Post Book World

Not only lays bare the forces that produced middlebrow reading but also explains a good deal of what is going on in the world of books today.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (August 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807848301
• ISBN-13: 978-0807848302
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #715,578 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 5 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.