My doorstop

One of the few accomplishments of my 10-day December flu (besides watching almost everything on my Tivo) was finishing Bill Clinton's gargantuan My Life, which had been kicking around the house half-read for so long that I decided to put it out of its misery. Unfortunately, the misery was all mine. That book is virtually unreadable after he leaves Arkansas, which makes me wonder: how many people could possibly have finished it? They've sold a million copies or so; could 25,000 people have read it cover-to-cover? 50,000? I'd guess the rest of the books have been safely stowed away or displayed on Democratic bookshelves.

So I was amused to read when I came back from vacation that Knopf is splitting the book into two paperbacks to sell in grocery stores, airports, and other non-bookstore environments. The Times story on the decision has a hilariously droll description of the disjunction between the two parts of the book:

A two-volume edition will accommodate a feature of the book that was widely remarked upon by literary critics and others last year. Roughly the first half of the book, which deals with Mr. Clinton's childhood, college years and political life in Arkansas, was judged by many to be the far more interesting portion, while, to many, the presidential material sometimes read like an annotated desk diary.

Anyway, it'll be an interesting test of word of mouth versus impulse buying. Anyone who's heard about the book will buy the first half, but average people who don't care about Arkansas politics and want to read about his presidency may get slammed. (This could be a boon to in-flight magazines -- imagine taking that thing to read on a long plane trip.) Bill Clinton wasn't the worst president of the 20th century, but the second half of My Life might be the worst book of the 21st.

Comments

[Ben]

I recommend the abridged version on CD. It's fun to hear the actual foam in his mouth when he talks about Ken Starr. And when he's blabbering on about his time as president (then this happened ... this this happened ... and here's an uninsightful description of this next thing that happened), he at least has a soothing voice. And to be fair, in a year when Paris Hilton and Sean Hannity release new books, the second half of My Life can't be quite the worst book of the year, let alone the century.