“A pair of shoes can change your life. Just ask Cinderella.”

There is literature and then there is just-a-book. Just-a-book is a misnomer maybe because there is a world of really awful crap that I won't touch- I see whole sections of this stuff in bookstores- but to me a just-a-book book is something by Grisham, Baldacci, Patterson, Turow.  Literature on the other hand is reserved for the classics and modern masters such as Murakami, Ozick, Roth--- understand?

 

And I have this need after reading some literature to goon a little spree and find a string of juts-a-books to get me ready for literature. It’s like a pretzels and cheese for the mind after eating gorgonzola gnocchi or brasciole.  So my literature recently have been Krauss’s The History of Love and The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki.  The Krauss book is a novel about a book written stolen plagiarized copied translated and the people it couches. And The Makioka Sisters is a beauty Japanese post war novel about four sisters and their adjustment to the “modern” world. Both very different and both quite wonderful. Then I fell into the world of James Patterson again but  this time started with his Alex Cross books hoping they were less formulaic. Duh. Untrue. Alex is a handsome black doctor/cop who falls in love a lot, gets screwed, is corrected by his grandmother and betrayed by someone he works with. He is fit, tough and manly man. Sigh. I thinking the days when  one had to wait for the next book to come out one didn’t see the formula so clearly. Is that being generous? But I buy these just-a-books from a library book store where hard covers are one dollar and paperbacks a nickel so I can read and devour them five at a time. It reveals the formula quickly.

 

Great literature can fall into patterns too but I wouldn’t call them formulaic. I mean Wharton writes about the rich trans atlantic world of the turn  of the century. Austen’s pattern are the pieces of ivory which comprise her vicarage life. And Hardy the blackness of people caught in tempests of their own choosing and the headlong roll to the cliff of disaster. But the writing transcends the pattern or rather fits and illuminates it and just-a-book writers simply entertain and distract. Oh I would adore being a successful just-a-book author, they get rich and seem to have a ball and sometimes there stuff gets made into a wonderful movie. (Elmore Leonard falls  on the line between just-a-bookishness and REAL art I must confess and Get Shorty was a gem)  But anyway I have to decide if I am going to pick up another Carl Hiasen book or switch to Toni Morrison. Hmmmm… maybe after I eat some taco chips.