I was reading the wonderful Garbage Day newsletter on Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy. This was bugging me all week as a title I recognised but couldn't place. Thankfully towards the bottom of the post the author had linked to If Books Could Kill, who this week rereleased their episode on the book in response to the news.
It’s an excellent precis of everything I had assumed about the book, demonstrating how it catapulted Vance to the position he finds himself in today. As our hosts say, its a book whose success lies in explaining 2016 Trump voters to the baffled New York set. Most importantly, it originates from a member of the white working class blaming that class’ own culture for its poverty, ignoring structural problems and letting the New York set off the hook.
The creators describe the books they review as “the airport bestsellers that captured our hears and ruined our minds.” Funnily enough, I was on a plane last week and the man next to me was reading something called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. “Gee,” I thought, “that book seems extremely irritating.”
Ding ding ding, we have an If Books Could Kill episode on it.
Turns out it is extremely irritating! The author, Mark Manson (“the third worst Manson”) developed the book from a 2015 blog post of the same name. “Obviously,” says host Peter Shamshiri, “the purpose of the cursing and the aggressive, edgy energy is to present the veneer of a book that is not like other self-help books. This is a cool self-help book… There is an irony to that because the real surprise of the book is that beneath that veneer is a very generic self-help book with advice you’ve heard a thousand times before.”
This sums up the tone of this refreshing review podcast. If, like me, you’ve always relished a bad review (see Roger Ebert on Pearl Harbor or Mark Kermode on Sex and the City 2) this could be the show for you. Anyone can call trash, trash though and so the real joy of If Books Could Kill is in the substance. Shamshiri and co-host Michael Hobbes deliver their reviews in detail having given these books a level of thought they perhaps don’t deserve. Over the course of an hourish long episode you often get the feeling that they’ve thought about these books in more detail than the authors.
Having stumbled across the show by accident, it’s that kind of weight that’s going to keep me coming back for more.
