I'm sickened when academicians tell people what they ought to like. Many, MANY of them, for example, praise The Great Gatsby, despite it's being an unremarkable, mediocre book. It's okay. It's not a great book. This is exactly analogous to the great fawning over, say, Citizen Kane which is an unremarkable, mediocre movie. I think people who are prone to a particular political bent - capitalism is ultimately corrupt - are the ones who think highly of either of these.
It could be said, "Well, Keith, you only say that because you're a capitalist!" Nonsense. A great book, one of the greatest, is Madame Bovary, one of whose major themes is the corrupting value of money. The most evil characters in the book are conniving middle-class capitalists. OTOH, there's another major theme in the book, one that was earlier summarized neatly in Pope's Essay on Criticism: "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, while drinking largely sobers us again."
To wit, shallow knowledge is often worse than no knowledge. In MB, this is evidenced in MB's initial forays into the romance novels of her time as well as the idiotic behavior of Homais, the sleazy pharmacist.
This introduces another point relevant to the discusson. Some people might (and many, many people DO) say, "It doesn't matter that a book is crap so long as people are reading more." This is said a lot in defence of books like Harry Potter (which I loved and which I loved reading numerous times to my own children). But it's also a dangerous misconception. There are books that can easily fill kids' (and adults) heads with garbage and their lives are not made better and they are not made into better citizens or better people because of their having read those books.
Finally, I agree that anyone could make a list, but only Oprah could make Oprah's list. She may not be a great academician, but she's a reasonably intelligent woman. Maybe there are better choices than "East of Eden," but there are a many, MANY, MANY worse far worse choices. I haven't read this particular book and already I know this. The pompous academics should stay in their rarefied air telling other academics what's good and what's not. For the rest of English speaking humanity, Oprah's doing fine so far.
If those jackasses had their way, millions of people would be turned away from reading entirely, because they'd be fawning over Henry James or James Joyce or any number of other writers whom they consider worthy, but not one normal person in a hundred (or maybe in a thousand) would enjoy (or even understand).
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