"That book sucks. You shouldn't buy it."
I spend a lot of time in bookstores, and every few days, I find myself saying those two sentences to a complete stranger. As you can imagine, the strangers don't react well. It's not every day that some presumptuous asshole walks up to you and tells you what you should and shouldn't do with your life.
Last week at Town Square's Borders, I saw a cute girl in an oversized denim jacket join the cashier line carrying David Cross's I Drink For a Reason. I told her not to buy it, and she removed her iPod earphones from her ears — she made a big show of this — and said, "Maybe you and I have different taste."
"Maybe," I replied, "but maybe not. I'm a huge David Cross fan. Mr. Show is my all-time favorite TV show, and I've got both of Cross's comedy albums in my car right now. I read a lot of humor essay books — pretty much all the popular ones — and I'm telling you, I Drink for a Reason sucks. Trust me."
She didn't; she bought the book.
For what it's worth, I'm not a presumptuous asshole; I'm a professional book reviewer. I look at it like this: If you saw a blind guy walking towards the edge of a cliff, you'd say, "Hey, you! Stop walking!" It's not that you think you're better at walking than the blind guy; it's that you have information he doesn't.
Similarly, when I see someone holding a terrible book and walking toward the cashier, I have information that she doesn't: I know the book sucks because I've already read it. And she hasn't. I don't think I'm better than anyone, and I don't think my opinion is more valuable — I just read a lot. Simple as that. I try to explain that reasoning to the pending book buyers who scoff at me but don't walk away — once I even used the blind guy/cliff analogy — but it's a lost cause.
In fact, often my efforts backfire, and the person I'm trying to dissuade becomes even more resolved in their pending purchase. After talking with me, their purchase is no longer just a consumer acquisition, it's a statement: I'm not going to let presumptuous jackasses tell me what I should and shouldn't do with my life.
That's what happened at Borders last week. But after the girl rode out of the store on her high horse, $25 poorer, I got the last laugh. If you don't believe it, track her down and ask her if she wishes she'd listened to me.
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