Borders thinks I want to seduce Mr. Darcy, or at least that I want to read about people who do.
Let’s back away from the question of what kind of heartless moron would want to stand between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, and examine the facts:
In their ceaseless Pellenorian quest to understand the Customer, e-retailers have turned to a set of software tools that monitor customers on a transaction level: what they buy, what they review, what they recommend to friends. Most people know this as the “Today’s Recommendations for You” line on Amazon — things that people who like what you like, like. In most cases it’s great: the more you buy, the better Amazon, or Borders, learns what you want to buy.
Until, that is, the system gets polluted. A year ago, invited to a friend’s bachelorette party, I purchased for her a copy of “Seducing Mr Darcy” by Gwyn Cready, which is a romance novel about a woman who gets trapped in Pride and Prejudice (the non-zombie version) and falls desperately in lust, to judge from the ebullient back-cover copy, with Mr. Darcy. The friend in question is an Austen buff and one of our earliest prolonged conversations was about the peril of falling for guys like Darcy (because so often tall dark and brooding is brooding because that’s the way he is, not because he needs someone to make it all better), so I thought it was a great purchase. I bought the book without reading past the cover, gave it to her, and she (being a romance-reading type of lady) loved it.
And now Borders thinks Mr. Darcy is my ideal man. I get e-alerts from them when he shows up, or when time travel romances peak in the bestseller list, or when Gwyn Cready publishes a new book. Props to Gwyn Cready, of course, it seems like she’s making the career work for her and her concepts sound like a lot of fun, but I’m a Zelazny/Crowley/Lynch/Mieville/Bujold/Dunnett kind of guy and I like my romance next to a nice glistening fire-seared cut of international (or interstellar) intrigue.
My fiancee, who gets many of her course books off Amazon, has a similar problem: she’s taking a class in the Islamic tradition now and she took a class last semester on American Fundamentalism, and recommendations for books on those topics have by far eclipsed whatever might be her personal preferences for pleasure reading.
Eventually, I think there should be a check box you can press at Amazon (or Borders) if you don’t want an item on your search history — not for privacy, but for convenience. But for the nonce, I’ll take my moments of zen when they arrive in my inbox on a Monday morning.