As I Lay Reading

3 Quarks Daily's own J. M. Tyree has a superb essay on Oprah's recent book club summer choice, William Faulkner, in The Nation:

While bookstores and literary supplements were studiously dumbing down their lists of summer book picks, Oprah Winfrey announced that her Book Club would be embarking on an ambitious program called "A Summer of Faulkner." Faulkner? Oprah? Really? The announcement amounted to nothing less than a sneak attack on the whole idea of beach reading--and on the intelligentsia's perception of her as the Queen of Midcult. Not that we should have been that surprised: For some time now, Oprah has been ignoring pleas for a return to contemporary fiction, instead sending the likes of Tolstoy, Steinbeck and García Márquez up the charts. Still, as a sheer challenge, Faulkner is a quantum leap up from other classics.

By proposing to read not one but three works by a dead white male whose prose laid siege to the conventions of narrative fiction, and whose furiously lyrical exploration of race and the American South still manages to unsettle readers, Oprah is taking a major gamble on her audience's attention span and political sensitivities. Once again, she has proved she is a more serious reader than many people--that is, anybody besides her millions of fans--reckoned. The woman Forbes magazine recently dubbed the most powerful celebrity in America seems intent on using some of her cultural capital for the brave if improbable purpose of a Faulkner revival--a project that reflects her belief in uplift through education.

More here.