I don't read a lot of books. This is because they have a lot of words and are not the Internet. As a result, I don't normally focus on books in this column. However, there's one particular series of books that's just too horrible to ignore any longer: Chicken Soup for the Soul.
I'm sure everyone's seen one of these before. It started out as one book, the original Chicken Soup for the Soul. This book was for the generic, standard soul. Then it blossomed into a gigantic empire of Chicken Soup books, branching out into all different kinds of souls: the Jewish soul, the teenage soul, the dog lover's soul, etc. These books were all highly acclaimed. Well, most of them. There were a few that didn't work out so well. For example:
-Chicken Soup for the Illiterate Soul
-Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul
-Chicken Soup for the Soup-Hating Soul
-Chicken Soup for the Blind Soul That Can't Read Braille
-Mein Kampf
However, most Chicken Soup books sold really well. This is because they appealed to a core demographic of readers, known as "post-Barney sentimentalists" or simply "people who have been lobotomized." To understand what attracts these people to Chicken Soup books, let's first review what Chicken Soup books are actually about.
Chicken Soup books are essentially short story collections. They come in many varieties, but all of them have a common goal: to be inspirational. If you're not sure what I mean, let's look at some actual titles of stories from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul "Changes in Life"
"She Told Me It Was Okay to Cry"
"She Didn't Give Up on Me"
"I'll Always Be With You"
"Be Cool ... Stay in School!"
As you can see, these stories are meant to inspire. For example, they inspire me to throw up all over my laptop. But Chicken Soup books are about more than just inspiration. They're also about depressing the hell out of everyone.
Here's a typical Chicken Soup story arc: person 1 meets person 2, person 1 becomes friends with person 2, person 2 has terminal illness and/or gets in fight with person 1, person 2 dies and/or moves away and/or loses the big spelling bee, person 1 learns valuable life lesson and/or dies. Basically everybody dies and we learn the true meaning of Christmas.
Of course, it changes for different books; for example, in Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul, person 2 would be a dog, and in Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, person 2 would be, let's say ... Israel. No matter who the characters are, however, the stories are often tragic, following the old adage of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Obviously these people have never been in a coma.
Apart from the atrocious content, let's stop to think about the actual title itself: Chicken Soup for the Soul. First of all, as a neuroscience major, I know that the soul doesn't exist. I also know that God is dead, but that paper isn't being published until April, so everybody pretend like you don't know.
As for chicken soup, it's totally overrated. It's nowhere near as good as New England clam chowder, which is by far the greatest soup ever created by mankind. Sure, chicken soup is the "classic" soup, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the best.
Look at it this way: if soups were bands, chicken soup would be Bach and New England clam chowder would be Radiohead. And I'm talking like OK Computer Radiohead, not that Pablo Honey crap. New England clam chowder is way better than "Creep," though if "Creep" were a soup it would definitely be Manhattan clam chowder, which is basically tomato soup that wishes it were clam chowder. Dream on, Manhattan clam chowder. You're the black sheep of the clam chowder family. Nobody ever liked you.
In conclusion, Chicken Soup for the Soul is stupid and needs to be outlawed. As does Manhattan clam chowder, which is a total poseur clam chowder wannabe.
Unfortunately the government is too busy fighting the War on Terrorism to focus on the War on Bad Literature and Soup, which will probably be a hot button issue in 2008. Of course, we could probably kill two birds with one stone by dropping Chicken Soup books on Al-Qaeda training camps and watching as the would-be terrorists inspire themselves to death. So if you're reading this, Osama: be cool ... stay in Jihad!
Matt Diamond is too lazy to even read his own columns and can be contacted at mdiamond@jhu.edu.
