First off, I want to say that I am a big fan of Book TV. I love that there is at least one channel on cable that devotes serious time to books. We've got Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's 6 minute interview segments that are often devoted to a book, but other than that, my 300 or so channels are a vast wasteland.
So yes, I think it's excellent that CSPAN-2 devotes 48 hours each weekend to books. Not lit-lite, but serious writers and serious topics. Not all of it is interesting, but I have always enjoyed stopping by at various times on my weekends off to see what is happening on Book TV. Sometimes I stop for 30 seconds. Other times my pause lasts over an hour.
I'm a fan. A book junkie fan.
But I have to say this: Book TV has two flaws, one minor, one egregious. First the minor one -- why run book programming from 8 am Saturday to 8 am Monday? Weekends start after work on Friday, and I'm ready to hear about books then. Anything after midnight on Sunday is DVR material at best. So why not consider starting book programming Friday night? Who wants to watch Congress at 9 pm on Friday? I prefer to vomit after my drinking, not before.
The second problem is more important. Why is Book TV only about non-fiction books? It seems like a slur on what is otherwise a celebration of literature that CSPAN would banish fiction from Book TV. Think about it this way. If you write a biography about William Faulkner, you can be interviewed on Book TV. If you are William Faulkner, well, tough luck.
Even if CSPAN argues that its mission is politics and society, the exclusion makes no sense. Some of the most influential political books of all time were fiction. Animal Farm, Utopia, 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Gulliver's Travels, Alice In Wonderland, The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Candide -- this only scratches the surface of works of fiction that affected political and social thought more than their non-fiction cohorts.
I'm sure the folks at CSPAN2 have a variety of reasons to explain their decision. None of which hold water. Pretending that fiction writing is not a vital part of our national life is pretending that our impressions of the civil war were formed by the history books and not by Gone With the Wind and Red Badge of Courage, or that Louis L'amour's vision of the West didn't affect our nation's attitude towards the land or national expansion for a generation. Ronald Reagan wore a cowboy had to for a reason, and I'm certain L'amour had something to do with it.
CSPAN, you're doing great with the non-fiction. But don't you think it strange that you can do a three hour interview with the literary critic Harold Bloom, but can't interview the giants of fiction he opines about? I'm sure the giants of fiction would be happy to talk. And I'd be happy to watch.