The (Bad) Taste Test: ‘If Books Could Kill’ and the Lure of Big Ideas
Make it stand out
When I was eighteen, at the beginning of my undergrad degree, a guy in one of my classes recommended that I read The Game, a 2005 book of non-fiction by Neil Strauss about pickup artists. I remember reading some, if not all of the book. Over a decade later, I listened to an episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill about Strauss’ investigative report into this society of strange, sleazy men.
If Books Could Kill, hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, bills itself as a critique of the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds. And The Game feels like the perfect microcosm for what this podcast does so well because, like Strauss’ book, so many of the texts that Hobbes and Shamshiri take to task are built around a certain kind of seduction.
In The Game, there’s the pickup artists’ own obsession with the act of seduction - achieved through everything from the low-key insidious “negging,” to a bizarre fixation on close-up magic and runes - and also something more meta; the way that the world Strauss enters into seems to be seducing both him and any unfortunate reader that cracks the spine on this book. The Game is constantly at war with itself, never really knowing if it needs to offer a meaningful criticism of the toxicity of this community, or if it should revel in their secrets, a kind of how-to guide. So much of If Books Could Kill is about the seductive appeal of airport bestsellers and popular science.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Books that the podcast has raked over the coals include Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; Hillbilly Elegy; The Rules; and The Coddling of the American Mind. These come from decades of history, and have a wide variety of topics. What they share is a seductive simplicity, one that has often had a corrosive impact on public opinion. The books often dive into Big Ideas: the fundamental differences between men and women; the struggles of disenfranchised communities in the United States; the culture of university campuses.
What so many of these books have in common is an overly simplistic solution to incredibly nuanced problems. That’s what makes them so seductive; the idea that after a few hundred pages of reading, you’re equipped to take on some of the biggest, most complex issues of the day. Something like Men Are From Mars suggests that men and women are simply fundamentally different; that their communication styles and responses to stress mean they’re worlds away from each other. John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, is big on the idea that when they’re stressed, men “retreat into their cave,” which essentially means avoiding problems, looking for any solution that isn’t about processing emotion. What’s striking here is not only the comically broad stereotyping - the episode on Gray’s book features dramatic readings of comically bad dialogue from alleged case studies - but the essentialism of it all: that men are one way and women are another, and never the twain shall meet.
“What so many of these books have in common is an overly simplistic solution to incredibly nuanced problems. That’s what makes them so seductive; the idea that after a few hundred pages of reading, you’re equipped to take on some of the biggest, most complex issues of the day.”
That Gray’s book is surface-level and disingenuous isn’t news, but what’s interesting about what If Books Could Kill does with Men Are From Mars and other texts is place its ideas in the context of a wider culture that it continues to impact, what Hobbes describes as “repackaging [an] idea that has been floating around many cultures as some sort of forbidden knowledge.” There’s a temptation, put forward on the episode on Gray, that it’s easy to look at a book like this - and many books throughout the podcast - as trivial and silly.
But by reframing them in the context of the world that the books helped to create, something like Men Are From Mars becomes part of an “architecture of gender essentialism,” something that only requires a few steps before reaching the idea that, as Shamshiri bluntly puts it “trans people aren’t real.” There are several episodes of the podcast that dive into The Trans Debate: from one on The Conservatives Vs Pride Month, and another on The New York Times’ War on Trans People, episodes that seem to be put in context through books like Men Are From Mars, offering a troubling through-line from airport bestseller to political radicalisation.
What Books That Kill does reveal is a bad-faith opportunism that defines not only the toxic nature of these ideas, but the relationship that they have with an increasingly harmful political dialogue. It’s no wonder authors like Gray and Strauss are referred to as “grifters” on If Books Could Kill - so much of what’s in the work, and so much of the impact it has, feels defined by readers being sold a con; whether it’s a lie about being able to be more attractive to women in The Game, or an inversion of that in The Rules, a dating-guide that tries to make you seem “hard to get” but that really promotes a toxic approach to relationships.
This is what’s at the heart of the often radically right wing politics that exists in the undercurrent of so many of these books: an opportunism that leads down a harmful political path. One of the most blatant examples of this in If Books Could Kill is the episode covering J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance tries to present himself as a voice for an outsider community taking on the political establishment that instead uses a reactionary premise - the way Vance blames the people of Appalachia for a culture that “creates or worsens poverty” - as a way to both define and justify his own conservatism. Like so many authors covered in the podcast, Vance is, in the words of Shamshiri “not a data guy,” and in fact one could say that, ironically, so many of these conservative writers - including William F. Buckley Jr., the OG of modern conservatism who’s book God And Man At Yale is covered on the podcast - think of their feelings as facts.
If Books Could Kill offers a kind of alternative cultural and political history: a way of understanding how we got to where we are through airport bestsellers. What makes this so compelling - alongside the chemistry of the hosts; a sense of humour that feels sharp but never cheap - is that it captures something fundamental about the act of reading: a desire to understand the world better. And while this might seem like an overly simplistic thing to consider, it becomes important - even urgent - in the context of a canon of books that are so able to take this idea and twist it into something insidious. If Books Could Kill doesn’t offer all the solutions for this problem - that would be impossible for one podcast to do - but it offers an interesting, intelligent perspective on the complex relationship between pop psychology, big ideas, and an endlessly shape shifting political landscape.
Words: Sam Moore