An Infection of Words

by

Lauren Roberts

There is no man who has less business talking about memory.

“Of Liars,” Michel de Montaigne (translated by Donald M. Frame)

“The people have spoken, and they don’t want this book!” is the feeling I have picked up—an accurate one given it’s quick disposal. And the national relief that it is not to be is palpable. Nicki Leone expands on this mood in her current essay, “Of Change, Alarm, Surprise,” when she asks: Is this what it takes to get a book to be news, to get newspapers, television and non-readers to pay attention to a book? It’s a damn good question, and her resultant essay is both blunt and thoughtful, well worth reading and even more worth remembering.

This particular project may be buried, but the trend in exploitation-at-any-cost is there, growing much as a cancer does. Slowly. Insidiously. Persistently. Unlike Nicki, I come strictly from a reader’s perspective. I’ve never worked in bookstores, for a publisher or in publicity. But I do read—professionally (as a reviewer) and personally, and the steady movement in this direction distresses me.

The publishing of sensationalistic material is nothing new. It’s certainly been going on since the 18th century, and probably since the invention of printing press and quite possibly long before that. Newspapers throughout history have thrived on crime; Hearst built his empire on the premise that you couldn’t feed the public enough gossip and scandal. Penny dreadfuls, frequently bemoaned in nineteenth-century England as time wasters and moral destroyers of servants, were very popular reading material. Fifty years ago, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was published, and it is still a shocking read. True crime is certainly not an untried genre; I believe that if well written it can offer genuine insight into human nature. Yet it seems to me (and, thankfully, to many people) that this particular book was a new low in its field, birthed in a mire of gunk and sludge, oozing its way, dripping, into hands eager to “participate in” the reenactment of a celebrity-and-media-drenched murder. This is not reading; it is a sick thrill.

What is reading then? It’s not any particular subject or genre or author or century. It need not be Shakespeare or Plato or E.L. Doctorow. “It is simply reading,” wrote John Livingston Lowes, in a commencement address he gave in 1924 (and which was subsequently published in 1929 under the title, Of Reading Books), as men and women have always read, for the delight of it, and for the consequent enriching and enhancement of one’s life.”

At the same time, reading “must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it” according to Hugh Walpole in Reading: An Essay. Both of those sentiments seem to me to clearly identify the what reading books is really all about. It is about life, about its parts whether they come to us in novels, short stories, poems, nonfiction. Death is a part of that including violent death. Such reading, if carefully chosen, can (repeat, can, not necessarily does) fall into the “consequent enriching and enhancement” arena if it illuminates rather than manipulates. Who can say for sure that In Cold Blood meets the “illumination” rather than the “manipulation” test? Covert as well as public comments and accusations that Capote used the murderers to catapult him to public acclaim have long been a part of the book’s history. Some might argue that this book is different only in that the accused-and-acquitted is the “author.” Merits could be debated as could the “value” of understanding the crime vs. supporting the publisher of the book.

But it would be a useless endeavor. We all have our beliefs so perhaps what I am asking of my readers is what they have already shown in this situation—a willingness and the courage to take a stand against their own misuse as readers because this type of situation will, sadly, arise again. 


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it