While book review pages are being cut drastically (see “Save This Endangered Species: Book Reviews“), Sundance catalog is doing its part to promote literature—or to weasel its branding onto everything. The Sundance Reader’s Collection offers eight paperback “staff favorites, guaranteed to inspire lofty dreams and earthly passions” for $98.

Apparently, they are banking on their recommendation alone.  Sure, they can peddle a nice western flowing skirt for $150, But who said they had good taste in literature? The only information offered about the books is title and author, that they are paperbacks, and their page counts—they are fiction, history, memoir, YA, essay collections, anything goes.

The collection includes a YA book that School Library Journal recommends, John Knowles’s A Separate Peace; a “classic of outdoor literature,” Beryl Markham’s West with the Night; a 1998 novel that LJ’s review calls a “bland modern-day fairy tale” and “A marginal purchase for large public libraries,” Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus; and a collection of New Yorker pieces by Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon; among others.  

If these odd bundled-buys take off (which I can’t help but doubt), perhaps Sundance can do its part to save book reviews and advertise their collections in book review pages. Or, they could invest in external intellectual property and offer reviews from an established source instead of empty recommendations that almost seem to mock the craft.