I must admit I am no fan of
bestsellers, generally speaking. No, it is not intellectual arrogance. Back when I was younger, I did have an uppity attitude towards bestsellers and people who read them. I automatically ruled them all out as
trash literature, centered on
high brow works (most of them non-fiction, I must also admit) and felt superior for doing so. But that was a long time ago. When I was still in my late teens. Not anymore.
I don't have a problem reading bestsellers and, as a matter of fact, find them quite useful to promote reading among the younger generations. After all, the Harry Potter series has made readers in the millions, something that nobody would have accomplished with the time-tested classics. That's for sure. I fail to see how that could be bad for society at large, honest.
So, if the right book shows up and enjoy a lot of popularity in the market, I don't have a problem reading it too. I won't turn it down just due to the fact that it is popular, as some people do.
Yet, I must also admit that, in general, most bestsellers leave me wanting more. Sure, they are full of action, packed with intrigue and thrilling stories most of the time, but I feel as if they lack something. For the most part, I tend to find them quite superficial, even prosaic. For starters, one doesn't know if the author truly wanted to write a book or just a draft script for a new movie. In other words, most of the time it's quite clear that the author doesn't give a rat's ass about literature or books, and is truly writing with an eye in the Hollywood producers. Is that necessarily bad? No, not really, but when I want to watch a movie I go watch a movie. Reading a book that only contains dialogue and no descriptions sort of feels precisely like that, like an unfinished script. I suppose that was to be expected in an era dominated by TV. Is that my only problem with bestsellers? Not really. The characters tend to be quite superficial, without much depth to them at all (again, it's the action that matters, just as in any
blockbuster). Also, they tend to simplify their topics quite a bit. There are no shades of gray. It all tends to be black or white, good or evil. Again, as in any contemporary blockbuster.
Does any of this apply to
Stephen King's
Cell? Well, to a great extent, yes.
Reading Cell, I had the feeling that Stephen King had just written a story about zombies, although in this case they are not dead people who return to life but rather regular folks who are infected by a virus spread via their cell phones. If you've watch any of Hollywood's many movies about zombies, pretty much everything applies to this book too. He is just taking a contemporary technology as an excuse, that's all. Is that bad? No, not really. But is it good? Truly, what does it give us? There isn't much new and original about the story, otherwise. Is the book entertaining? Sure it is. Isn't that what a book is all about? Well, it depends. If all you are looking for when you sit down to read is pure entertainment,
Cell will be OK. On the other hand, if you want to be inspired, if your aim is to broaden your mind, to learn something new, to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and learn something new about life, see things from a different perspective... well, you will get none of that from this book. As I said, it's pure entertainment. And that is neither intrinsecally good nor bad.
Well known NPR commentator Keith Devlin writes about the history and current state of the field of Mathematics for the general reader. Along the way, he shows us how the invisible patterns behind the world that surrounds us can be deciphered with the help of this usually thought of as arid discipline of human knowledge. The reality is that Mathematics is a central part of our culture and we should perhaps be more familiar with it than we are.
