What Dewey Read?

Those of you who are particularly attached to the Dewey Decimal System should stop reading here.

Now then, for those of us who are growing impatient with the traditional categories of book classification, like "Geography" or "History," I have a radical new proposal. If it strikes you as strange, if you put down this newspaper in disgust, I ask only that you read it again after you've trekked to the Harvard Book Store or the New Book shelf at Lamont Library.

The system is easy to learn; there are only five rubrics. I am confident that upon reflection you will find it is better suited than the Dewey system for today's literature.

1. Thin Untrue Books: Under this heading I would group all hard-cover fiction under 120 pages. Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County is the paradigm for books of this sort. All Thin Untrue books must be handsomely bound, like something an immaculately groomed man would tote in the hand not clutching his leather attache. If these books were to be written in, and translated from, Albanian by Albania's premier husband-and-wife writer-translator team, so much the better.

2. Fat True Books: These books are almost always biographies. They are at least 650 pages long, with a minimum of 100 pages of end-notes. The author has spent a minimum of 12 years in the archives researching his subject. Fat True Books can be about political types (Henry Kissinger, Chairman Mao) or artistic types (Mark Rothko, Marlon Brando). They need not be about anyone you've ever heard of.

These books are not meant to be read so much as cited. Sometimes there is a CD-ROM version of the Fat True Book in which you can see, in three sparkling dimensions, the kindergarten classroom where the hero of the biography first learned how to double-knot her shoelaces.

3. Multi-Culti Books: Under this heading I include both I. (Third) World literature and 2. the whiney, self-righteous tirades against those books by conservative reactionaries. The fascination with the books in the former sub-division emerges from the liberal disdain for hieracrchy. Classical Mongolian verse simply cannot be any better or worse than Milton, the true multiculti declares. I'll grant the fundamental equality of all the world's literature when the deans of leading medical schools across America supply their students with Rwandan anatomy text-books on the grounds that they're all the same anyhow.

As for the vast corpus of literature that decries the evils of multiculturalism, these books are sometimes useful. But often, they are so clumsily argued and poorly-wrought you would think the author didn't spend too much time reading the canon he so adamantly defends. Traditionalists are sometimes the most ignorant of tradition.

4. Thomas-Hill Books. Call it neo-Thomism. Recent additions include Senator John Danforth's Resurrection and Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson's Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. If ever we become tired of the Democrat/Republican two-party system, we could always mold American politics around the great Thomas-Hill divide.

5. Science Books: You know, science.

There's a lot of fun to be had with this system. Try, for instance, to pigeon-hole the Bible. Is it a Fat True Book or Multi-Culti? And if it is Multi-Culti, then is it of the World Literature variety or the conservative reactionary? How about The Bell Curve? Ah, the joy of reading.

Samuel J. Rascoff's column appears on alternate Fridays.