Last Book?

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
13. interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
16. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
17. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
18. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman
19. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
20. the namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
21. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
22. seven types of ambiguity, Eliot Perlman
23. Unhooked Generation, Jillian Straus
24. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
25. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
26. This Book Will Save Your Life, A. M. Homes
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
28. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
29. jPod, Douglas Coupland
30. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
31. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
32. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
33. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson
34. No Acting Please, Eric Morris
35. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust
36. Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, William J. Mann
37. The 9/11 Commission Report, Various
38. The Aeneid, Virgil
39. Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk
40. No Logo, Naomi Klein
41. Jimmy Stewart, Marc Eliot

Alas, it appears that I shall fall well short of 50 on the year. Oh well. There's always next year, I suppose.

As I had been expecting, No Logo was fantastic in the analysis department and somewhat lacking in the active department. I think it's partially deliberate on Klein's part, but partially symptomatic of any kind of cultural analysis. The problem is not the writer; rather, it's the nature of the game itself. Writers identify power structures and the rules they operate under, but power structures are not fixed, nor are they monolithic. An analysis may be brilliant, but once the rules of the game change, the utility of that analysis also falls. Time and time again this has happened, ever since people have been writing about culture and economics.

Klein's brainflash is the identification of brand politics (which, to be honest, I'm not even 100% sure if she's the first one to observe, though the hoopla around her book certainly indicates she was one of, if not the first), and its repercussions, both on the industries themselves and on us, the consumers. The superbrands are companies which have attempted to divest themselves of physical manifestations, the selling of "things", and instead package a lifestyle, a lifestyle summed up in one of their products. This is why Adidas can sell a cologne, Virgin can operate an airline company and Roots (a Canadian clothing label) can open a resort. Expertise can be bought in the blink of an eye; what cannot be instantly created is brand cachet, the identification of specific values and beliefs with a certain brand. Klein believes that this strength is also the weakness of the brands, that using the limitless value of a brand against its creators provides the economic leverage for change.

It's a nice thought, but looking back on her book now it seems (as all such statements inevitably seem) quite naive. Yes, there has been change. Yes, there have been times when companies have backed down, or been forced to change policies quite publicly. But does anyone honestly think that sweatshops have been eliminated? Klein is quick to point out that one of the problems with anticorporate activism is that there are few alternatives; a backlash against Shell meant that a contract went to Chevron instead, but Chevron was guilty of many of the same practices - Shell just happened to be the company that came up on the radar first. Small towns campaign against Walmart, but freely allow other big box retailers to move in, even though their effects are exactly the same as a Walmart moving in, just in other lines of retail. Klein also notes that the debate was shifted quickly by producers from, "Why are we using sweatshops," to "What defines a sweatshop, and what are the minimum requirements that we can get away with?" In a move typical of big business, "sweatshop free" has gone from a legitimate moral issue to just another marketing tool, another way to differentiate your product (American Apparel, anyone?).

It's clear that what's really needed is a paradigm shift in society, an elimination of the hold which brands retain on the consciousness of people, and yet such a statement is far more naive than Klein's belief in a grassroots, sustainable development movement. People simply don't care. They don't care that their entire value system is force-fed to them by others, they don't ask themselves why, they don't ask themselves who really benefits. They just want to live, they want someone to tell them what to do, where to do it and how long to do it. Hell, I'd like that sometimes. We all would, wouldn't we?

Wouldn't we?