Ge'in Snarky: Books

I found Chris Bohjalian’s myspace page. You may remember him from Oprah’s Book Club. He’s a bestselling novelist who, interestingly enough, “writes beautiful and riveting fiction featuring what the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed 'ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity'. "

Here's how he handled "who I want to meet" :

“People who read books. You know, books? They are those antiques made from ink and pulp? They have a spine (literally and, on occasion, metaphorically). Once upon a time, we read them instead of dish about Paris Hilton on the Internet."

Here were my thoughts:

What? That’s so fucked up. It’s awful. Whereas we used to have inky pulp and tiny spines, now all we have is an information superhighway. And we use it to talk about the lives of socialites, their parties, their tortured romances, their mad grabs and desperate clingings to power and fame, their dealings with family names and fortunes. What is society coming to? We traded the ration of time given to us each day to read books for internet surfing, and it’s leading us closer and closer to our demise with each passing second. I AM ONE OF THE "PEOPLE" HE SPEAKS OF.

I felt fucking AWFUL. Needless to say: I b-lined it to books and stole not just one but TWO of them. I used the reading skills I had developed on the internet and read and comprehended every word in each of them. OMG you guuyyss. THEY WERE FUCKING GREEEAAAT. The first one was a rich tale of socialites and heiresses, their grand parties, their tortured romances, their dealings with family names and fortunes, grabs and misgrabs at social power, integrating a young woman from one sector of high society into another and the issues that brings up about both cultures, and all the while a war was going on. It was fucking crazy. It was written in the 19th Century, which is “once upon a time” if I’d ever heard it. And I had. Now I knew what I had been missing all my life. I mean, it was kind of like the internet, only instead of seeing images and videos of the heiresses and thinking “they look just as cheap and kind of boring and real as me and the millions of other people who post pictures of themselves on the internet,” I thought, “these people lead the most fascinating, beautiful, important lives in Western history! They define the human experience. They define Art.” I mean, people wrote whole books about them. Whole entire, beautiful, beautiful books.
The second book I read was full of facts and figures. Like ones that compared literacy rates today to those in the past. And ones that showed me the rate of book publication today versus that in the past. And ones that described who used to have access to books, what kind of books they read, and how often they had the chance to read them. Even ones that compared children’s IQs of today to those of yesteryear. Interestingly, the coolest thing I learned was that Chris Bohjalian is perpetuating a really annoying, baseless, self-serving myth and should shut the fuck up. And that older public figures don’t understand how quickly you can wring the essence of someone’s being out of their attempt at tackling myspace profile creation, but they should learn before they wreck everything for themselves.