"ONE BOOK NEW YORK" Is one STUPID IDEA

So, somebody over their Sunday Times and their BAGEL AND A SHMEAR, thought, "Hey, what if ALL New Yorkers ALL read the SAME BOOK? Won't that be fun?"

The answer, in a word, is NO.

And a photo of three dippy chicks holding up books hardly suggests that ONE BOOK for "SUMMER READING" is the literary event of the year.

Leave it to TWITTER, which promotes TWEETS only slightly bigger than what you find in a fortune cookie, to be the main tool for promoting this twaddle.

Yes, yes, how lovely...LOVELY...to make sure everybody buys a copy of some lame best-seller EVERYBODY LIKES. Oooh ooh, "Manhattan Beach." See, it's got MANHATTAN in the title. Jennifer Egan! Woo hoo!

Of course Jennifer hasn't one YET. Oddsmakers are sure that TONI MORRISON and MAYA ANGELOU will give the bitch a run for her download money. (We're talking about reading this on a KINDLE, right?)

Really? ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK. We're talking about 8 million people living here, and another, what, 4 million who commute in from the shitty places in the suburbs? We're ALL supposed to get on "the same page?" For fuck's sake, WHY? I thought the big word of the day is...DIVERSITY.

We all get together and walk around the streets carrying a copy of JENNIFER's book, or TONI's book, or MAYA's book...and what exactly does that accomplish? We all "feel good about ourselves?" As opposed to feeling...sheepish?

The only GOOD thing I can say about this dumb "why don't we all..." do-gooder douchey idea is that it might get a few people Tweeting suggestions that just might lead people to want to read a New York book they missed, like "Last Exit to Brooklyn," or "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" or "City Boy" or "The Pawnbroker" or any number of titles from the vast array of New York writers ranging from Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth to April Smith or Ronald L. Smith. Maybe an autobiography from Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. Maybe a book on the history of New York and dim names such as Peter Stuyvesant or Fiorello LaGuardia. Hmm, some people never heard of "Here is New York" by E.B. White or "Up in the Old Hotel" by Joseph Mitchell, or "Gotham" by Mike Wallace, or a walking tour like "The New York Nobody Knows." Or "Forgotten New York." The important thing, well-intentioned saps will tell you, is to "start a dialogue." It's part of the zeitgeist, and informs your rhetoric, and adds the right trope to the underpinning of your threnody.

Still, this notion, as dumb as choosing the "best pizza place" in the city, or how to create THE most authentic egg cream, does provoke a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" response. This "everybody read the same book" ploy stinks of the self-congratulatory lame-brained cheese-faced nature of middle-class assholery, especially as practiced on the West Side (where there are STILL BOOKSTORES, EVERYONE!). You know the West Side...where everyone goes to Zabar's. And everyone wears Old Navy. And everyone takes some nuts with them into Central Park for an hour. And everyone talks about taking a yoga class one of these days. And everyone is on their cellphone on the #10 bus. And everyone goes to Starbucks in the morning. And everyone reads the Sunday Times. And everyone bought...jeez, move over Jennifer, Toni and Maya...pudgy E.L. James might win.