I first noticed www.goodreads.com four months ago when
a coworker at my bookstore sent me an invitation. The website tore
through the Seattle bookselling community like an STD. Soon, every
bookseller under 40 was a member. “Will you be my Goodreads friend?”
we’d whisper to each other among the stacks. It was like MySpace, only
better—it was all about books.
There is some literary culture on MySpace. I have four Haruki
Murakamis among my MySpace friends, which means at least three people
love Murakami enough to counterfeit his existence. This impulse is
understandable—his characters are often replaced by empty, shadow
selves. One of the counterfeit Murakamis claims among his influences:
“the female form, isolation, despair,” and “beauty,” which sounds like
what a seventh grader would believe an author would write on a MySpace
page. It’s a touching tribute.
MySpace also has at least seven people claiming to be Bow Wow
(né Lil’ Bow Wow), and I’m not sure they’re making
statements about the duality of self. MySpace has niche areas set aside
for movies, politics, music, and comedy. Nowadays, the first thing a
band does, before even practicing, is set up a MySpace page. But the
stunningly small amounts of money publishers spend on advertising
virtually guarantees that there will never be a MySpace books region.
Goodreads crept in to provide that service.
Goodreads doesn’t require as much personal information as
MySpace—most profiles only include age, location, and a photo.
There’s no place to enter your dating status, or how lonely you get at
night after you’ve had three beers. That’s because Goodreads isn’t
about something as earthy as rutting. It’s a weird monument to the
solitary exhibitionism of reading, and it’s addictive—the online
equivalent of the glow you get while reading Anna Karenina on
the bus, where strangers can see you reading Anna Karenina on
the bus.
All book snobs secretly want to expose their reading habits to the
world, and this interface makes that possible; it’s book porn. There’s
a comments section attached to each book—user Sarah, for example,
has a delightful pan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed:
“I couldn’t help but feel like she’d taken a vacation in my life and
then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could
only have achieved because she had already been in a position of
privilege.”
Compared to MySpace’s sad little nod to literature—the
“Favorite Books” box—Goodreads is an evolutionary leap.
Does anyone over the age of 16 even have a favorite book? Claiming a
favorite is only indicative of the fact that you haven’t read enough:
Out of the thousands of books that I’ve read, with the enormous palette
of ideas and emotions they’ve represented, how could I choose only,
say, five? Why not ask for a favorite orgasm, or laugh, or grain of
sand?
Like all good flings, the Seattle bookselling community’s dalliance
with Goodreads faded before it got serious. Almost none of my friends
log on nearly as often as they did during that first, blushing
courtship. Most booksellers truly love books; they talk about them all
day long. The idea of a place where you can compose epic monologues
about books and keep an online diary of every book you’ve ever read is
intoxicating. Then you realize that nobody but a few bored friends are
reading your opinions and everything suddenly seems redundant. Even
though it’s pleasant to take bitch-slaps at other fanatics on Goodreads
(I sniped at a friend who gave four stars to Rick Moody’s atrocious
memoir, The Black Veil; someone drily dug at my adoration of
Ann Rule), it is, ultimately, a lonely pursuit, in which one spends
hours quietly trying to discern order in a chaotic world.
We already have a hobby like that—it’s called reading.
