Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.