Why I Hate the Book of the Month Club
Oh, how the mighty have fallen
I have of late written negative pieces, deriding certain trends in education, AI, and all the rest. I recently committed to myself I would write more positive pieces than negative, more praise than condemnation. I still hold to that commitment, but I will set forth on that journey immediately after I get this off my chest: I loathe the book of the month club.
The BOTM has a storied history. While there are several “book clubs” in history that printed widely-circulated versions of popular books, BOTM is perhaps the most notable. The classic “book of the month club” network served both to give wide circulation to some established authors and occasionally to give a new audience to new authors. The best of the best have passed through BOTM, either as main selections or as features. I have many vintage BOTM selections on my bookshelves today, from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to Heller’s Catch-22 and more. Refereed by a panel of judges, being a BOTM selection was for many decades a great honor, and has ensured that lovely editions of classic books were widely available then and remain available today.
BOTM has seen several changes over the years, being shuttered and then re-opened as it changed hands through various corporate acquisitions. Along the way, it lost its jury selection model, which I imagine explains some of its decline in quality. Its most recent iteration, beginning in the late 2010s, is “subscription box” service, where subscribers have the option of selecting among a few new publications to receive in their mailbox every month. For regular readers, the benefits are obvious: the subscription cost is less than the retail price of most new books, so having a new (or sometimes old) hardcover book show up on your doorstep is welcome. Books through this service are of varying quality, both in construction (some sewn bindings, mostly glued, terrible paper quality, and so on) and in writing.
Before I go further, I don’t intend to deride any particular reader or author. If you enjoyed a book I didn’t, that’s fine. I don’t claim to be the arbiter of good or bad taste in fiction. If anyone reading this happens to be a writer of a book I didn’t enjoy, unlikely though that may be, the same applies. My reviews (thankfully) are not gospel, and so I truly mean no offense, it just may be the case that I loathed your writing. You’re free to loathe mine in recompense.
As I mentioned, BOTM will send subscribers a list every month of a few books (usually 4-5) to select from. These come, ostensibly, from a variety of genres and authors. Some are reprints of old classics (BOTM has sent out anniversary editions of Donna Tartt’s books The Secret History and The Goldfinch, for example), some are debut novels, and some come from established, award-winning writers.
Personally, I have been subscribed to BOTM for two full years now, starting in March of 2023. One of the more useful features BOTM offers is a “skip this month” option, which allows you to save your credit if none of the monthly selections appeal to you and use it on the following month. In the 24 months I have been enrolled, I have received 17 books. This means that I have skipped 7 months out of the 24. In other words, nearly 30% of the time, BOTM sends me a list of four or five books that I simply cannot conceive of myself enjoying reading, and I pass on the option rather than choose my own adventure of suffering. This usually occurs because, while the genre selections vary, one dominant genre is some variety of romance (even those books not officially marketed as “romance” but rather as “contemporary fiction” are, in actuality, romances). These books and their descriptions are quite obviously aimed not at me, but at the most profitable reading audience: women who consume vast quantities of steamy fiction.
In helping me sift through the options, BOTM provides helpful subject matter “tags” to help reader understand the themes or “vibes” of the book. Is this relationship drama? Family trauma? A thrilling mystery or a steamy love affair? Readers want to know! This feature blessedly helps me avoid most of the things people on “BookTok” are apparently reading, because this past month, 3 of the 5 selections included the subject tag “Salacious.” This, I have learned, is BOTM’s polite way of saying a book is written primarily to titillate.
Additionally, while I would never object to reading books written by women on that basis, the books on offer through BOTM are heavily skewed to both women authors and women audiences. I must reiterate to be clear: this is not an in-principle objection. I hoard and adore books by Donna Tartt, Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, and so on. But given the relative weights of genres on offer, I have found that the very few books written by men that BOTM provides are more reliably ones of interest to me. Male authors that land on the lists have generally written a work of science fiction, history, historical fiction, or one of a number of things that interests me more than modern romance.
What has stunned me more than anything is how many of the books I have received have been simply poorly written. It is almost as if the authors have all attended the same creative writing workshop and are working from the same checklist of exposition, dialogue, suspense, and narrative arcs. Heavy-handed exposition-through-dialogue is my most common complaint. I often have to put these books down after a single page, not because they are deep or difficult, but because they are infuriating. Who talks like this? No one, that’s who.
On narrative arcs: there have been no fewer than four entries of the 17 I received that have been some sort of elaborate revenge fantasy, where a woman or group of women gets one over on a dirty, cheating man. I can think of no word to describe what motivates these stories besides “resentment.”
I am mostly just shaking my fist at clouds. If were truly so overly upset, I could simply cancel my subscription. But I began the subscription on the basis of another commitment I made to myself: that I would read more recently published literature to have a better grasp on both what is being published and to perhaps correct a bit of my chronological snobbery. Unfortunately, my time as a BOTM subscriber has done little to change my mind on the preferability of older, tried-and-true literature against contemporary offerings. I know for a fact that truly excellent things are being published, but for one reason or another, they are generally not making it onto the lists offered by BOTM.
I have heard various explanations for this. One is economic. The reading public demands trash, and so publishers and book subscription services will provide it, and have always done so. Fine. Another explanation is that BOTM as it stands acts as a kind of clearinghouse for overproduced trash that they know to be trash, but nonetheless foist upon unwitting subscribers. This may be the case, but the fact that some of these books and authors are award-winning suggests to be that BOTM is tapping into broader literary trends more than simply selecting bad books. In other words, it seems to be the case that the majority of even very popular books being published are just bad.
Not long ago, I made lots of people very mad on Twitter by suggesting that we can understand a little of why men don’t read more fiction by observing the kinds of books on display at the front of bookstores. Of course I know that these displays are responses to market trends, not primary drivers of them, but my argument is simply that men attempting to become “readers” will in bookstores and on the internet find a community that caters explicitly to the desires of a very different demographic. It’s not that there aren’t good books to read. There are more excellent, old books available to read than I could ever read in a lifetime. It’s that I’m frustrated by an industry that seems to reward mediocrity and a reading public that seems offended by the very idea that their favorite books are just not that good.
Perhaps I’ll finally tap out after two years. There are better ways, I imagine, to find good, recently published fiction (a family member of mine makes a habit of reading the short list for the Booker prize ever year, for example). But every month, when I log into my app and browse the selections, I maintain just a smidgen of hope that the offerings will be better, that my discontented reviews will move the needle, and that next month’s pretty blue box will contain my new favorite novel. Thus far, I remain disappointed.
I always appreciate a fist shaking at the clouds. It makes my own fists feel less lonely.
I subscribed to BOTM a few months ago and agree with the majority of what you have written. I am a woman, and typically love books written by women (I am also a huge fan of Ursula K Le Guin and co), however the books I’ve received thus far have been very poorly written and seem to be directed to a YA-leaning audience. Frankly, if you are looking to read more contemporary literature I feel that you are doing yourself a disservice by subscribing to BOTM, which is for the most part “bottom of the barrel” literature. There is great contemporary literature out there and this is not it.