I am quite enjoying my Readers’ Advisory class this year. The professor, Juris Dilevko, author of the contrarian Readers’ Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries, 1870-2005: A History and Critical Analysis, is setting up the class as a debate between the previous (pre-1980) conception of Readers’ Advisory as the suggestion of “good” books and the promotion of education, and the current idea of “Give’um What They Want” and the promotion of Genre Fiction, promoted by the huge Genreflecting series of books, as well as Saricks’ Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library.
Dilevko has gone through the history of publishing and the current state of the publishing industry, dominated by huge media conglomerates and excessive advertising and cross-promotion. Opposed to this is a selection of books weighed by time, evaluated through numerous reviews and analysed by literary experts. For the corporations, it does not matter that the books are “good”, but only that they are read (or that they win one of the hundreds of book-awards that now exists). Risky artistic books are slowly becoming a rarity.
The question the class continually reaches is this: either of these positions is inauthentic. Why is it any better that one group of people tell us what to read over another group. The choice he presents, and I think it is a great conclusions, is this: it is true that someone is going to tell you what to read. Would we rather give that power to a corporate process which cares only of the bottom line, or to the evaluation of history? Would we rather be marketed to, or would we rather take a wait-and-see approach to what books will be considered worth of recommendation.
As for the question of the “superiority” of supposing that we can educate people, Dilevko quoted Reading Lolita in Tehran to the effect of saying, why do those better off think that those worse off do not want to read good books? Is this not more discriminatory, thinking that everyday people will not or cannot read classics?
The reality lies somewhere in between. Some of the best writing being done today is in “genre” fiction, which, judging from this post, doesn’t seem to have gotten past its tired old definition as something akin to Mickey Spillane and Rosemary Rogers. To put Joyce Saricks on one end of the spectrum is absolutely ludicrous. This is one of the problems of having library schools staffed by faculty who have never worked in a public library.
January 28th, 2008, at 4:39 pm #