literary diet pt.1: participation points
This Week in Reading
The Lost Order by Steve Berry
This March, I am only reading books I buy at the grocery store. There is a whole rack of books at the Vons near my apartment, under a sign that says “Reading Center” in large, white text. They are exactly the type of books you’d imagine: Nora Roberts novels and police thrillers and other fat paperback books printed on newsprint so flimsy it feels like it is disintegrating between my fingers as I turn the page.
I picked up this one, titled The Lost Order, last weekend along with brownie mix and peanut butter and dish soap and all of the other things I needed. In a way, the Vons Reading Center is the most accessible literature in America. Yes, anyone can walk into a bookstore, and yes, the library is free, but those places require intention on the part of the reader. Everyone goes to the grocery store, and when they pick up eggs and ice cream and toilet paper, there is also this shelf of books, within easy reach. There is something novel about throwing a book on the checkout conveyor belt next to your tub of yogurt. If I may, I would even argue that it is romantic for literature to be sold at the same place that sells us food. Books are considered as essential to our lives as sandwich bread and milk, what isn’t romantic about that?
In my corner of the internet, I am generally pretty well informed about what the buzzy book of the moment is. But I’ve never read any of these paperback thrillers on display at Vons, and they are all #1 best sellers. This is what America is reading, and I want to read it to.
I genuinely believe that things that are wildly popular must have inherent value. There is a tendency to turn up our noses at the low brow, decry whatever teen apocalypse movie is blowing up the box office as trite and formulaic. Say that Starbucks is basic and that that one band was good before they sold out. These judgments of taste are actually judgments of character. We want to feel special and separate as a way of feeling superior, and so we scorn the mainstream in favor of highbrow entertainment and artisanal coffee. Indie has become synonymous with cool, which has become synonymous with good. If too many people like something, it can’t possibly be valuable.
What a bizarre logical fallacy for us to have settled on.
Humans are so disagreeable by nature, shouldn’t the fact that a majority has finally come to consensus mean something? If a large number of people deem something to be good, perhaps, in fact, it is. It’s not that I want to know what the masses are reading—rather, I want to be part of the masses. I love pop culture because I love participating in collective experiences. As someone who probably took the unit on rugged individualism in eighth grade history class a little too seriously, I have spent a lot of my life asserting my independence. I wanted to be recognized for my singularity, wanted to do it all alone. Now there is something refreshing about being part of something bigger than myself. I listen to a lot of Top 40 in the car; flipping through my pre-sets in hopes that one of the stations will be playing Wolves by Selena Gomez ft. Marshmello. I love texting friends about movies and Taylor Swift, I follow Oscar season with the same religious zeal many people afford to the NFL. When everyone else is watching Star Wars, I want to watch it too so I can be part of the conversation. You can’t be part of the conversation if you were too cool to participate in the collective. Mainstream culture brings us together. I don’t have much in common with my coworkers, but I can walk into work on Monday and ask if they have seen Black Panther and what they thought of it.
How well loved something is is not a meaningless aspect to assess when we make judgments of value. To produce something that can be enjoyed by a huge swath of people is no small feat, and might in fact be the greatest feat of all. I have said it before and I will say it again and again and again: disliking something because everybody else likes it does not make you interesting, it just makes you an asshole.
All that being said, The Lost Order is sort of like if National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code had a baby, and then you dropped the baby on the ground and it turned out extra ugly. There are approximately a quarter of a million characters and 12 plots lines that are supposedly woven together. A few of them off the top of my head: a former president named Danny Daniels (?) investigates the mysterious death of his friend/former senator, gets himself appointed to the senate and foils a plot to make the House of Representatives all powerful. There is also a character named Cassiopeia Vitt (?!) who is casually restoring a literal castle in her free time (?!!). She is looking for lost Confederate gold with a man named Cotton Malone (?!?!) who is the great grandson of a Confederate spy/artist/sentinel for a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle. Cotton Malone is a Smithsonian agent (????) and lives in Denmark (we never go to Denmark and it has nothing to do with the story, but the author likes to mention it frequently). There is also something about the Supreme Court and finding hidden treasure using coded maps carved into rocks? It is kind of fascinating how in a book where half of the characters hold elected office, the author never specifies what party any of them are in-- but I guess that is how you appeal to readers in groceries stores in every state across the country.
It is not a good book, but I genuinely wish it had been. I am hopeful the next one I read will be better. Maybe I will try a romance novel. I’m headed to Vons after this, we ran out of butter.
Further Reading
Two blockbuster thriller books with mass market appeal that were definitely available at the grocery store when they were first released: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. The millions of people that bought and read them were right, they are both very engrossing reads.