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Janice Radway is Hooked on Books!

A professor in Duke University's prestigious literature program, Janice A. Radway is "considered one of the leaders in the booming interdisciplinary field of cultural studies," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her first book, Reading the Romance (1984) has sold more than 30,000 copies in two editions and was "one of those rare books that helped set the agenda for emerging scholarship," according to the Chronicle.

Her second book, published in October 1997, is A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Read here about Radway's fascinating research at the BOMC offices and what she learned there about her own read ing pleasures.




Hooked on Books


Have you have ever gotten "lost" in a book?

Did you ever join a book club for the great premium and then get hooked?

Do you think the book is here to stay--that it's more fun to curl up with a hardcover than a laptop?

Then you'll want to read Janice A. Radway's A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.

Twelve years ago, after finishing a book on why women read romance novels, Radway, a literature professor at Duke University, turned her attention to the Book-of-the-Month Club and the process of selecting books to be sent out to its members. For several summers in the mid-1980s, she traveled daily to the club's offices in Manhattan to sit in on meetings and mine its archives.

Radway approached her research at the Club as an ethnographer would, interviewing club employees and examining records left by the club's founders and original judges. Like other ethnographers before her, she discovered that she was a participant in--as well as an observer of--the story she was trying to tell. It was not just that she had read many Book-of-the-Month Club selections, as she did during a prolonged convalescence as a teenager. It was also that, at a deeper level, she was--by social class and origin--the very reader that the club imagined and helped to create.

As her research continued, Radway developed a growing sense of identification with the editors at the club. She writes, "Listening to them talk of the visceral pleasures of being immersed in a book reminded me of intensely resonant scenes of reading from my own past. The straight-backed chair I was sitting in would become the rickety, yellow chaise lounge on our back patio that I sought out again and again on long, humid summer evenings after dinner in order to read."

Radway herself had once been a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club, joining as a graduate student in English to get the Concise Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which she saw as an indispensable accouterment of the cultured intellectual. Unlike many who fulfilled their basic commitment and then dropped their membership, Radway continued to buy books: "I bought cookbooks, novels by women writers, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, an arty edition of Moby Dick with fancy woodcuts, and even a copy of Roget's Thesaurus."

But she also tried hard to keep her voracious taste for bestsellers, mysteries, cookbooks, and nature books a secret from her colleagues in graduate school, who implied that she should prefer to read Henry James, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound. While she did read and gain a growing appreciation of these literary modernists, she justified her preference for more middlebrow works because of her specialization in American popular culture and the need to be familiar with the most widely read books of the ti me.

Years later, while doing research at the Book-of-the-Month Club's editorial offices, Radway found the individuals who worked there "oddly familiar." She says, "They talked about books with a kind of intense fervor and expansive pleasure I had not heard si nce my conversations with the librarians of my childhood. They were enthusiastic and openly passionate about books, not deliberately reserved or self-consciously ironic about their own tastes, as were many of my academic friends."

After many years spent as a professor of literature, Radway (currently president-elect of the American Studies Association) is in many ways still attracted to the middlebrow way of reading, to the kinds of pleasures that the Book-of-the-Month Club selections and alternates offered the club's judges, editors, and readers. In her book, she explores those pleasures--and their limitation--in a series of analytical yet personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Moc kingbird.

Radway's own story of herself as a reader is interwoven with a vivid history of the Book-of-the-Month Club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an organization that has been uniquely successful in marketing culture and in inf luencing what Americans read. She explains the remarkable longevity of a club that uses sophisticated marketing techniques to sell not only individual books but the very idea of literary taste itself.

When Radway speaks to groups about her research, one of the first questions she is always asked is whether her book will be adopted by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Although the club expressed interest in the possibility, Radway and her publisher decided not to offer it for adoption in order to avoid the perception that the club was endorsing her analysis.


A Feeling for Books is available at bookstores or from the University of North Carolina Press. 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet! Email ordering also available.

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