Joe Queenan, author of Closing Time, Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and The Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else, some other books, and now a memoir about books titled One for the Books, hates books. And authors. And readers. Also libraries and book clubs. Probably also book bloggers.
Hate on me, hater.
In this baffling interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Joe Queenan offered observations that range from bizarre to baffling to my-Spock-like-eyebrow-of-skepticism-cannot-go-any-higher. Like:
The[ ordinary person] read[s] about one book a year and it’s by Tom Clancy or James Patterson. They read books – the average person reads books by people who didn’t write the books that they’re reading. They got someone to write them for them.
Joe Queenan also hates ghostwriters. Or at least he hates the readers of ghostwriters. (Are Tom Clancy and/or James Patterson just fronts for ghostwriters?)
EDIT: So after therelentlessreader’s comment (see comments) about where Queenan gets that “average American reads one book per year” number, I had to look it up.
According to a 2007 Pew Research poll, the average American reads 17 books per year. The median is a little lower, at 8 books per year. Men tend to read fewer books than women, and the 65+ cohort reads more books than younger folks do. No demographic group in the pool reads fewer than an average of 11 books per year or a median of 5 books per year.
Insert joke here re: writers can’t math; enjoy irony of this blogger having just mathed.
SIEGEL: Now, you don’t discriminate here between high literary efforts and, let’s say, well-executed pulp fiction. There’s a place for that as well in your reading.
QUEENAN: Yeah, especially when you’re young, because when you’re young, you’re not going to start reading Jane Austen or Dostoyevsky, you start out reading people like, in my case, Agatha Christie. I read all of the Agatha Christie novels when I was young, and I really enjoyed them. And when you go back to read them later, they don’t hold up as well because she’s not really a great writer. But you move on and they open the door for you.
Robert Siegel has a really weird definition of “don’t discriminate.” Also, I have to wonder how much of thinking Agatha Christie is “not really a great writer” the second time round is because on the second reading, you already know whodunit.
Self-published books are great. Self-published books are so, so addled.
TRUE STORY: I also review for Kirkus Indie, which is the arm of Kirkus that does accept self-published works for review. Basically, a self-published author submits his or her book, the Kirkus review fee ($425 for standard service, $575 for express), and the book gets sent to me or someone like me for review. Kirkus Indie reviewers aren’t required to produce positive reviews; we can and do pan books.
Almost without exception, the self-pubs I’ve reviewed via Kirkus Indie were “so, so addled.” (I’ve panned only one so far, though, because even most “so, so addled” books have at least one redeeming quality.) By contrast, the self-pubs I’ve reviewed on this blog have been, almost without exception, above-average.
I don’t generally screen the self-pubs I get here; if it’s offered and it fits our very loose definition of what’s appropriate for this blog, I’ll take it. Which makes me wonder if there’s not some element of balloon-headedness that makes writers more likely to shell out $425 to put their magnum opus in the world’s oldest book review publication, versus the ones who e-mail me and are all “I wrote a book, I think it’s pretty groovy, wanna review it?”
Joe Queenan has not set foot in a library since the invention of the Dewey Decimal system:
Libraries kind of depress me and part of it is because you know that you can’t read all of the books that they have, but a lot of it is because libraries used to have some kind of way of putting the kind of Graham Greene and Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte stuff in one category, and then they’d have like Daphne Du Maurier and people, but they wouldn’t have the actual trash mixed in. And now it’s just all one big mall and it’s kind of depressing because most of the books you see in the library shelves are terrible books.
Dear Joe Queenan: popular fiction in Dewey-Decimal-categorized libraries is shelved under “FIC.” The classics are shelved under “800.” You’re welcome.
Joe Queenan also hates bookstores, but that’s totally justified, because bookstores hate him:
as soon as I walk into a bookstore, the people – the irony boys who work in bookstores, they just always figure, what’s he doing here? He’s looking for a book about Roger Maris breaking the homerun record or something. And they just don’t like me. They just don’t.
I can think of at least one reason for that that has nothing to do with Joe Queenan’s appearance.
Book clubs are even more offensive than bookstores:
The other thing is that when I read books, particularly when you read, like, you read Oscar Wilde or you read Moliere or particularly Shakespeare, I would consider it an invasion of their privacy for me to express any opinion about their work. The market has spoken. There’s nothing that we can add to this conversation
This doesn’t even make sense. Readers are the market. And a great many “the market has spoken” classics were panned like hell when they were first published. Should we stop reading Moby-Dick because nobody liked it when it came out? The market has spoken!
Ahab thinks your taste in books is crap.
About the only thing Joe Queenan and I do agree on is the joy of plowing through about 200 books a year. Though even here, we disagree: he claims to read 60 or 70 books at a time, while I stick to two at a time: one fiction, one non-fiction. (Currently, that’s Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and John W. O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council. Your reading may vary, but I totally recommend Wolf Hall and, if you are into the Protestant Reformation, Trent as well.)
The ordinary person reads one book a year? Did he pull that number out of a hat? This is one bizarre interview!
Wolf Hall is amazing by the way, not that my opinion matters..I’m just a book lover after all
It is! I wanted to read Bring Up the Bodies after hearing Hilary Mantel’s NPR interview in October, but then I learned Wolf Hall is its prequel, so I figured I ought to read it first.
Also, based on their respective interviews, I would definitely rather have coffee with Hilary Mantel than with Joe Queenan.
I liked Bring up the Bodies better…Wolf Hall had a little bit of a pronoun problem or something? There were times when I was all WHAT?? Who is saying/thinking that?
But it’s still a fab read..loved it. I think I’d rather have coffee with just about ANYONE else!
Also, I totally just Googled “average American reads how many books per year.” The very first result was a 2007 Pew Research poll that says the answer is “17.” Tom Clancy’s and James Patterson’s ghostwriters must be very, very busy.
In Clancy’s case, at least, most of the books with his name on the cover aren’t written by him – I’m talking about all the “Tom Clancy’s Op Center” and “Tom Clancy’s Net Force” and whatever other series he’s put his brand on. It’s not exactly ghostwriting, as the actual author gets their name on the cover too (in smaller print). But it is true that when someone says “Tom Clancy novel” they aren’t always talking about one written by Clancy…
Thanks! I asked because I really had no idea whether or not Tom Clancy wrote all the books that bear his name.
I remember being devastated when I learned that “Ann M. Martin” was a team of ghostwriters. And temporarily devastated to learn “Carolyn Keene” was one as well, until I found out who exactly Mildred Wirt was. (Answer: pretty cool, is who.)
Eeesh! One book a year? I think my brother-in-law reads more than that, and he’s a self-professed book hater, who will only touch a book if pretty much everyone he knows tell him that he, specifically, will love it. (The last one was John Scalzi’s Redshirts.)
I do agree that Agatha Christie isn’t a great writer on second reading, not because you know whodunnit, but because she cheats, and on second readings you can see where she’s cheating. On the first pass, you don’t know that the bottle of red nail polish is important. On the second pass, you can see that our detective finds out it’s red ink, which is very important, but the reader hasn’t been told.
And Mr. Queenan apparently isn’t familiar with Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap). Books aren’t exempt just because he only wants to see wonderful stuff. Going out and finding it for yourself is half the fun! Of course I may be biased in this regard. I read, on average, 5-10 books a week. Less than that is a slow week, more not unusual. Most aren’t crap, but most aren’t wonderful classics that everyone should read either. This week has been priceless because I got four new books by authors I love, all of which proved excellent – so half my reading for the week was really high quality. That’s an excellent week!
Not to mention that “crap” is often subjective. Which, ironically, is a thing I think Joe Queenan understands even if he doesn’t say it; he points out in the interview that he loves the occasional “trashy novel” purely for entertainment value. If your purpose is to be entertained, and the book is entertaining, it’s hard to see how it’s “crap” for your purposes even if it has no apparent literary merit.
And now I’m terribly curious: what four awesome books did you get?
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold), Cold Days (Jim Butcher), Trapped (Kevin Hearne), and Kitty Steals the Show (Carrie Vaughn). Pluses, four awesome books in very short order. Minuses, I did NaNoWriMo this month, which meant this last week had a lot of frustration choosing between reading time and writing time.
I’m going to go out a limb here and say his comment about how many books people read a year was an intentional understatement. He probably has internet access. He can google reading statistics if he wants.
I also love how Queenan’s “libraries depress me because you can’t read all the books” statement gets totally glossed over in a post about how much Queenan hates books and libraries. Why not harp on that statement instead of running in a completely literal direction?
He can google reading statistics if he wants.
Yup. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes about the view of the “average reader” that he *wants* to cultivate, rather than his curiosity about what the “average reader” is actually doing. Particularly heinous for an author, in my opinion, because part of being a published author these days is marketing yourself. An author cannot market hir work without even a modicum of curiosity, let alone knowledge, of the available markets.
Admitting one doesn’t have such curiosity in a nationally-broadcast interview is going to get noticed by those of us in the book-marketing world. I’m much less inclined to help an author market anything if I know said author holds opinions of the reading public like the ones Joe Queenan expressed – remember, the “intention” in “intentional understatement” was to underline Queenan’s belief in a dismal illiteracy among the unread masses.
Why not harp on that statement instead of running in a completely literal direction?
You’re right, I did miss that one.
Dear Joe Queenan:
If you’re truly sadfaced about not being able to read “all the books” in a library, including the ones you trash as totally unacceptable and the ones you insist nobody is allowed to have an opinion on, ever, perhaps you need to try a small-town library? Most of them stock a disproportionate number of classics (also under “800,” so don’t go looking in “FIC”!), and the total collections are often small enough you could actually read them in a year or two at your usual pace. (I, for instance, have read two small-town libraries in my lifetime.)
…If you do not appreciate snark, this post – and perhaps this blog – are not for you. Luckily, it’s a big Internet, and you can start your own blog!
Oh, exile. Hurray. I think it’s a little preposterous to decide that he “cannot market his work without a modicum of curiosity, let alone knowledge of the available markets.” You seem to think you speak for the “book-marketing world” and/or that Queenan actually wants your help to market his book. I don’t think that’s the case. Further, he clearly doesn’t want the average reader to read the book (if you read the book or followed his work at all, that would be readily apparent – he despises the unwashed masses). Also, apparently he CAN market his work, because, you know, Viking published the book (you can Google it if you want – it took me 5 seconds) and he’s had a career as a professional writer as opposed to having a blog and being self-published (not that there is anything wrong with either of those). He must be doing something right.
And if you don’t appreciate people commenting on your snark, perhaps the Internet is not for you!
Gee I have enjoyed reading and listening to Joe Q but what a bummer call on reading. I must run in the wrong circles, my local Barnes & Noble is always jammed and the people at my roundtable book club always bring at least 2 books they’ve read that month. That’s 24 a year, and I know they read more. Glad I’m in my world and not Joe’s.