There is a type of person you know and dislike. Similar to a snob, but not snobby in the traditional sense of Lexus or Rolex's. The type of person who has chosen one particular aspect of life and become an expert; most often either in fine food, movies, or music. Whatever you want to call these braggarts, they exist and labor tirelessly to spoil your enjoyment.
Perhaps one overhears you casually mention your favorite food is curry, and swiftly rushes in to inform you about their semester abroad in Mumbai, and that you've never had real curry, just an American bastardation of the dish.
Maybe you tell one of these folks that you really liked Dogma, only to be informed that Kevin Smith movies are derivative of the German Impressionist films of the early seventies, overly reliant on ambrosial dialogue between underdeveloped characters and lacking in plot.
God forbid you happen to enjoy the same music as one of these folks, let's say the band Rancid. They'll look troubled for a second, but quickly regain their composure, cast you off as a parvenu, and let you know that yes, they do like Rancid, but they only like their old stuff.
Yep, these folks are out there, and it's not just you, everyone hates them. At least I hate them, or hated them, before I joined goodreads.com and realized I was ONE OF THEM. No, I may not wax philosophical about carpaccio or dismiss post-1983 Dead shows as nothing but Santa Claus on heroin, but apparently when it comes to books I'm just as bad. Only, before goodreads.com, I had no medium for my obnoxious inclinations.
(Sure, there was that one time in college I cursed a girl out for mixing up Tom Wolfe with Thomas Wolfe, but I chalk that up to drunkeness rather than literary snobitude. Like the time I mistook a homeless man for Method Man and challenged him to a freestyle rap contest, the T. Wolfe incident resides on a long list titled "things that never could have happened without the game Power Hour.")
If you're unfamiliar with the website (www.goodreads.com), more or less you just create a giant list of your favorite books and rate them on a five-point scale, leaving a brief comment if you're so inclined. There's a social aspect to the site as well, as you compile a list of friends, although I suspect the site is geared more towards revealing the literary tastes of your current friends than fostering new friendships based on shared taste. I established my goodreads friends by letting the site sift through my gmail contacts for potential members, mostly coworkers from a job I left a year ago in order to come back to school.
The next step, for me anyway, was indignation. Comparing these friends ratings with my own, my first thought was "jesus, this site is letting people play tennis without a net." Carlos gave 5 stars to Angels and Demons but slammed Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being with 3. Samantha loved Confessions of a Shopaholic but finds Cormac McCarthy "too boring". It wasn't just the obvious ones that got me, but even lesser offenses, like Brent awarding 5 stars to The Catcher in the Rye but only 4 to Franny and Zooey.
As I read on, my blood pressure skyrocketed and I found myself having horribe thoughts about these people. I caught myself composing hostile emails in my head, suggesting that the makers of goodreads add an SAT score to user's profile or require everyone who rates Don Delillo to have at least an M.A.
I don't want to have thoughts like these. In the world outside literature, I like and respect these folks for their wit and competence. And of course I hate the snobs and faux-savants who ruin my meal or movie, so why should books be any different?
For me, books are important, something to be taken seriously. My pie in the sky dream is to publish a novel of great importance, the kind of book a lonely but literate 14 year-old reads and thinks "wow, I'm not the only sentient being on this planet." So when an author attempts a work like this and succeeds, I respect the hell out of them. Conversely, when some blowhard writes a bestseller about sexy vampires, I curse them for using up the paper that might have held the next Look Homeward, Angel.
Still, there's not accounting for taste, and it's the asshole who keeps people from enjoying things they really like. I don't want some creep with a culinary school diploma behind me snickering everytime I order at a restaurant, and I'm sure my friends don't need me blasting every opinion they have about a book. (Hell, at least they're reading.) I've thought it over, and I'm deleting my account.
Good reads? I say, good riddance.
