Simon Alexander Collier
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Books
  • Historical Timeline
  • Historical Figures
  • Japanese Terms
  • Blog: Of Simon and Samurai
  • Contact Me
  • Links

Chicken Soup for a Brain

6/28/2012

0 コメント

 
A friend of mine kindly forwarded an e-mail from a well-known book promoter offering a free telephone seminar featuring an interview with the author of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. This reminded me of something I thought when that book and its numerous follow-ups first appeared - has there been a worse book title in the whole of human history?! Yes, yes, I know the books have sold gazillions and I am sure that the title played its part in contributing to that commercial success, but it’s still mind-bendingly, buttock-clenchingly awful. 

For a start, the metaphor doesn’t even work - I get that “chicken soup” is intended here to mean something soothing that will make you feel better - but I can’t stand chicken soup and I doubt I’m the only one. Surely “nice cup of tea” (for the British edition at least) or “foot massage” would work better? The quality of the metaphor aside, the meaning - this book will provide something comforting for your “soul” - is unspeakably appalling. Why not drop the metaphors entirely and just call it “A Bunch of Sentimental Dross”? Other books have made me want to hurl them across the room, but usually only after I have read at least part of them.

But wait! I could be being unfair, since the title has prevented me from going within so much as ten yards of a copy. So as part of my extensive research for this blog I read online the first story in the first of the books...and it was worse than I could have imagined. Unthinking, unquestioning, cheap emotion of dubious authenticity. I struggled to get to the end and the story isn't half a page long.

So maybe the “chicken soup” metaphor works after all? The books are something you would only imbibe if someone had a gun to your head or you were in need of an emetic...
0 コメント



返信を残す

    Author

    Simon Alexander Collier is a former British diplomat and the author of "Milligan and the Samurai Rebels", a humorous, historical novel set in the Japan of the 1860s. 
    Born in 1970 in Oxford, England, Simon now lives in Tokyo, Japan. He is married with two children. 

    Archives

    1月 2016
    8月 2013
    7月 2013
    6月 2013
    5月 2013
    4 月 2013
    3月 2013
    2月 2013
    1月 2013
    12月 2012
    11月 2012
    10月 2012
    9月 2012
    8月 2012
    7月 2012
    6月 2012
    5月 2012

    Categories

    すべて

    RSSフィード

のシステムを使用 カスタマイズできるテンプレートで世界唯一のウェブサイトを作成できます。