After about two years of skipping months, pausing, and occasionally pleading with customer service, I’ve just canceled my Book of the Month membership. It’s not a decision I take lightly. I’ve (apparently) bought 52 Book of the Month selections over the past decade. I enjoy finding old Book of the Month editions at used bookstores, and their backlist–if you can find it–leads to some fascinating work that is forgotten today. Though always viewed by literary insiders as a sort of booster club for flyover readers, BoTM backed some fantastic work in the last century and some pretty good work in this one. This was once an important institution in American literary life. It’s too bad, then, that lately it seems to be a clearing house for publishers to move large-print beach reads.
Book of the Month is picking terrible books — or, more charitably, they are picking books that aren’t for me. This month the selections include If Not You, a romance novel about copywriters who can’t admit that they’ve fallen in love; The Wretched Divine, a fantasy about a lady knight who has “spent her life honing her blade, driven by the memory of the monsters who tore her family apart” in a demon-haunted world; Kiss Slay Replay, a “wild and twisty new horror novel” about a wedding party; and more selections from the same vein of light and easy reads. I’ve written here before about what I see as “reader’s books”, and while Book of the Month may be utterly slaying with their target demographic of millennial and Gen-Z women–who knows?!–I do not believe they are choosing books for readers like me.
When I say “books for me,” I don’t mean “books for men.” If they picked from among even the finest examples of legal and military thrillers, “long fact” books about World War II or old wooden ships, or any of the other utter drivel marketed at men, I would have rushed to the cancel button even faster. No, “books for me” are reader’s books, erudite books crafted with care for people who see themselves as part of a literary tradition. I don’t mean “the canon.” I don’t mean books by white people or books by Westerners or books by straight people or any of the common thoughtless identitarian objections you will hear to this argument. I’ll gladly read Leslie Feinberg, Percival Everett, Kenzaburo Oe, Isabel Allende, Ama Ata Aidoo, and anyone else who takes the project of literature seriously alongside the old standards. Just make it good.
I’m sure Book of the Month is picking entertaining books that buzz on TikTok and feature voices their customers enjoy. I am simply not one of those customers. I suspect, however, that there are many more–even among those in BoTM’s target demographic–like me who feel similarly ignored. I also think the problem is bigger than Book of the Month. As I argued in that “reader’s books” post linked above, I believe the major publishers and booksellers are optimizing themselves out of business. Book of the Month is following their lead, chasing market data which shows–unequivocally, I’m sure–that the most profitable customer is the one who chooses If Not You from the top of the stack. But where, when that profitable customer is ready to move up to the literary reading lists, will they turn for their next book? It won’t be Book of the Month.
Maybe most will never make that turn, but for those who do, the future is small, independent, and erudite. Leave the bestsellers to AI and let the readers talk among themselves.