Oprahfication

There are actually four kinds of people, so long as you are sorting by reading habit.

From an article in the Guardian via That Shakesperherian Rag, a blog I stumbled upon recently:

• Page Turners, or avid readers, finish the books they start and who read a significant number of books annually.
• Slow Worms, always finish their books, but don’t whip through them, preferring instead to take their time and wring every drop out of a given text. Because of the way they read, they take longer with each individual book, and thus read fewer books per year.
• Serial Shelvers are a variation on Mikita Brottman’s bibliomanes, people who purchase books to line the shelves of their living spaces, but rarely (if ever) actually read them.
• Double Bookers are readers who have two or more books on the go at any one time, flitting back and forth between or among them as their whims dictate.

I am actually a mixture. I am a Slow Worm (who doesn't feel the need to whip through a book, though I will read and reread and reread a book) and a Double Booker. I always try to have at least two books going if I'm reading at all. Right now, it's Frida by Frida and, let's see, some M.F.K. Fisher, and whatever's on the back of the toilet tank when I'm in there, like, some Michael Pollan. I just finished Diane Athill's book Somewhere Towards The End. (I'm glad I read it, but I don't feel the need to read it again or to read any of her other books.)

So, the reason I stumbled upon That Shakespeherian Rag was because I came across this quote from there on another blog:

Zoë Heller observes “a relatively new and very unhealthy phenomenon” arising, perhaps, from “Oprahfication of fiction writing or book clubs: This demand for characters you can root for, inspirational fiction, where you feel like you’d like to climb into the book and be there. There’s something slightly infantile about all of that. It clearly doesn’t win me any friends to say this, but I feel [like saying] a lot of the time, when I’m answering questions in bookstores, ‘Oh, grow up!’ If literature still has, in the Victorian sense, any edifying purpose, I think it’s that capacity to muster empathy for people unlike oneself or of whom one disapproves.

I have absolutely no idea who Zoe Heller is, but now I want to marry her.