So I’m working on a bigger piece on a recent report about incels, but in the meantime I found myself a little distracted by a thread on Twitter about harmful “Airport Books” — that is, those non-fiction books usually with one big and possibly very bad idea that are waiting to snare unwary passengers at the airport bookstore.
Some suggestions from the thread that followed include Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Neil Strauss’s The Game, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Rachel Hollis’ Girl, Wash Your Face, “all those New Atheist books,” and of course The Art of the Deal by that guy whose name we’re all very tired of hearing.
So are there any “Airport Books” (or just popular books in general) that you think have made the world a little (or a lot) worse? (Fiction is fine, too, especially if he has a didactic side to it.) Let us know in the comments!
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The Myth Of Male Power
Left Behind
Any James Dobson book on parenting, beginning with Dare to Discipline. He’s convinced generations of people that it’s okay to beat your kids.
I got Hillbilly Elegy as a white elephant gift last Christmas and thought about hate reading and maybe tweeting about it. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. Other contenders would be The Secret. Also any diet book.
For fiction, I guess Harry Potter. Maybe not the books themselves but because their popularity unleashed TERFy Jo onto the world.
W H Smiths in Bristol airport had Piers Paul Ried’s Alive. Which I thought was a bold choice.
But as to the subject matter, I was a bit surprised by how many of my friends have read that Jordan Peterson book.
I didn’t expect Peter Thiel to turn Vance into a fascist troglodyte, but I did notice in Hillbilly Elegy how Vance blames the folks back home for their problems even while insisting that they aren’t racist. He claimed they resented Michelle Obama because they allegedly knew she was right about their diets. Instead of, you know, her being an educated Black woman who acted “uppity.”
The “New Atheist” books probably don’t belong in the category, unless the airport booksellers were hoping to get sales from outraged Christians. The only similarity with the Big Bad Idea books was their tendency to assume that the religious right represents Christianity as a whole.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/fascist/
It’s getting worse with every passing day.
At least I live fairly close to a military base. If (when?) those fucking idiots push the Button, I’ll probably end up as a shadow on a wall rather than have to experience the aftermath, not that I’d live for very long anyway. People who become long-term survivors of large-scale collapses of civilization do so as members of sufficiently-resilient communities, not in isolation, as a rule.
Given the general trajectory of, well, everything, the real question facing me now, I suppose, is whether to keep scrimping and saving (not that it’s doing much good; my finances tipped into the red a few months ago from some combination of increasingly needing to resort to taxis, OESP being cut off, and general inflation, and I now have perhaps 2 years left to live under a best-case scenario), or say “fuck it” and blow the whole wad on some hedonistic shit while waiting for the bombs to fall.
Art? What’s the point now? Even 2 years wouldn’t nearly be long enough to get it all done, and it’s not like I’ve any way of actually getting it before a real audience … which is probably about to be vaporized anyway.
Unpopular Opinion everywhere I posted it before: The Robert Jordan fiction books. In the first book, there is no detectable sign of the misogyny that will burst over everything from the second book onward. So people (mostly men) get hooked and then die on the hill of defending their favorite series from having misogyny bursting at the seams throughout the rest of the series where people (including men) are legitimately raped multiple times and it’s presented as romantic. I was sexually assaulted by an immediately ex-boyfriend following the tropes of that series, and if I hadn’t been able to physically out-wrassle him, I would have been raped and he would have thought he was being romantic like his favourite role models.
These books are frikkin’ eeeeeeverywhere at the airports, it’s so triggering. All I can do is smile and think about how mad all the assholes got when their pure Nazi nation was made multicultural in the show. I wonder if they took out all the abuse and rape and crap too, but not enough to actually watch it.
Is your incel piece going to cover this?
//www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/22/incels-rape-murder-study/?fbclid=IwA
Diego Joaquín Galante and Lamarcus Small were also the creators and owners of the site that encouraged vulnerable young people to take their own lives while live streaming it. And some of them actually did.
https://www.wvtf.org/2022-01-18/disturbing-website-encourages-vulnerable-users-to-die-by-suicide-whats-being-done-about-it
Despicable.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray. I didn’t actually read this book, but who among us would blame me. I learned all I needed to learn when I read an interview with him. Sadly, I cannot locate this interview online. He was a celibate Transcendental Meditation monk for nine years. After he stopped being a monk, he went on a date and the situation got sexual. He said that the woman was not bringing him to orgasm quickly enough, so he reached down and put her hand directly on the spot that worked for him. See? That’s how different women and men are.
The men that I’ve dated aren’t all about efficiency. To be fair to John Gray, my sample didn’t include him. And what do I know. I’ve never been to Mars.
I give up. Who is at home.
It might be time to put my old dog to sleep
Heinlein, also, with the amazing sexism masquerading as feminism.
I’m going to go with another unpopular choice, probably: Conundrum, by Jan Morris.
An immensely popular book in its day, it was a trans memoir of the 50s and 60s published at the end of the 60s or in the early 70s. Although I have no doubt that the author really is Jan Morris, from my own publishing days I also have no doubt that the content was heavily shaped by the editor(s), and it gave a pretty warped view of being trans that was then used by Janice Raymond to demonize trans women just a few years later.
Now I’m not saying that Morris is directly responsible for Raymond’s behaviour or that Raymond would have been pro-trans except for Conundrum, but it was still a bad book that fucked up a lot of things in the popular mind. Raymond’s book was influential but not widely read. Conundrum was widely read.
Then, of course, there is the ever popular Fifty Shades of Grey. What a fucked up book. I’m surprised no one beat me to mentioning it.
And let’s not forget Freud and pretty much everything he ever wrote, though we might as well top the list with The Interpretation of Dreams, because that was more intrusive on the popular culture than other works of his.
I’m not really sure how influential Mein Kampf or Mao’s Little Red Book actually were. I think LRB was published after he was already in power and it was his control over the country that caused it to be read, not the dissemination of the book that allowed him to gain power, but again, I don’t really know Chinese history. Likewise with German history. I do know when it was written, but I’m not sure how influential it was. If it was widely read and increased his popularity allowing him to bounce back from his term in prison to leadership of the Nazi party, well then that was a really, really bad book.
I would put “The Turner Diaries” on here, but no one actually reads it who isn’t already a racist fuck. Seems more like it affects the style of racist fuckery rather than the amount of racist fuckery.
I’m sorry to hear that *offers hugs*
The Scarlett letter: Pretentious, wordy tripe that I couldn’t get through the first two pages.
Gormenghast: See above, but I made it to page 60.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Horribly, horribly accurate depiction of America sliding towards a theocratic state. It’s a good book, but I had to quit halfway through due to depression and rage.
Eat, Pray, Love: Somehow you can find yourself by merely wandering around the world and taking a superficial dip into other cultures. Instead of you know, actually examining your views and values and asking yourself is this toxic, or going to therapy.
@Elaine the Witch I’m so sorry, that’s always a difficult decision to make.
@Elaine the Witch
I’m so sorry you’re in that sad situation. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for an animal is to let them go. All the best to you, your husband, and your dog.
Elaine, sorry to hear about your dog. That’s a tough position to be in.
I’m glad you mentioned Gladwell. In “The Tipping Point” he wrote such awful stuff about gays and AIDS that I tore the book up, so no-one else would accidentally get my copy.
Not sure they’ve been sold in airports but the memoirs of German generals post ww2 such as Halder and Manstein embedded ‘clean Wehrmacht’ myths in the west for many decades
Fiction, I totally agree re Robert Jordan. I would add the Ayn Rand propagandist/fantasy author Terry Goodkind
@everyone
Have you ever tried to struggle through Walter Scott’s “Heart of Midlothian”? That’s not a book, that’s a torture device.
@Carstonio
From what I can tell Vance was headed in that direction already long before he met Thiel.
@Elaine
*hugs*
Elaine, I’m so sorry about your dog. That is a really hard choice but like David said, sometimes loving them means letting go.
As for books, no specific author comes to mind but any of those hustle culture “be a millionaire” books that insinuate rich people earned their insane wealth and if you’re poor it’s because of your “bad mindset.”
@Elaine I’m very sorry to read that. It’s never ever easy to get to that decision, but at least we have that opportunity to give them an easy, pain-free end. Our local veterinary hospital were very good about it (no rush, making everything very unstressed, explaining exactly what would happen etc.). When you know it’s time, I hope it happens gently and you are OK.
I would say self-help books with the message that “positive thinking” solves everything. They also typically push a superficial form of self love. I think some of the problems with this are:
Sorry to hear that Elaine. Pets steal our hearts.
@ GiJoel
Oh I looove Gormenghast but a big YES to to Eat Pray Love. On the now-defunct Videogum Gabe Delahaye did my absolute favourite movie review of all time for the Julia Roberts adaptation (unfortunately now behind a subscriber thingy but this wayback version should work)
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112000757/https://www.stereogum.com/1765909/the-hunt-for-the-worst-movie-of-all-time-eat-pray-love/videogum/
Elaine, I’m sorry about your dog.