Harry Shannon
26 February 2019
Well, can you? If so, you must be in a minority.
Go into a bookstore and check out the non-fiction titles. To give you an idea of what you’ll find, I typed ‘secret’ into Amazon’s website and looked at the non-fiction books that were listed.
First up was 21 Metaphysical Secrets: life changing truths for unconventional thinkers — including 9 do-it-yourself energy experiments, followed by The Awesome Power of Secret Magic: Wicca Spellcasting. Well, I hadn’t realised I’d find myself in the New Age section.
So I kept going. After a few novels, I found Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. This is a Serious Book. I know that because the blurb says it was listed as one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, New York Times Book Review, TIME, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post — and of course they are all Serious Reviews.
Scroll down a bit more and you come across The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from A Secret World. Fair enough, I have never learned secrets from trees.
Then comes ATI Teas Secrets Study Guide; TEAS 6 Complete Study Manual, by a group who superfluously called themselves the TEAS Exam Secrets Test Prep Team. They must be successful, as it is the 6th edition of the book. But after giving away the secrets for five editions, it’s a dubious claim that they’re still secrets.
In a different genre, there is Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War. And I always thought it was Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination.
Now you might think that the whole point of colour is to be visible to everyone (even those like me who are somewhat colour-blind). But how naive I am. There’s a book called The Secret Lives of Colour. And it made NPR’s list of the best books of 2017.
I didn’t think I needed to go on. But I did it, and lo and behold I was back into New Age when I discovered The Secret Language of Birthdays: Your Complete Personology Guide for Each Day of the Year. I wondered if the secret was the word ‘Personology’ which is so secret it isn’t in my Canadian Oxford Dictionary. In fact, the description states: “combining astrology, numerology, and pure psychic intuition, The Secret Language of Birthdays is a wholly unique compilation.” Well, I guess that’s true, this evidence-free combination sounds unique to me. But unique isn’t the same as secret.
I’ve only listed a few of the titles. I didn’t get past page 5 on my search of ‘secret’ on Amazon books. Altogether there are 101 pages of these books, which is a warning never to tell a secret to a writer. It won’t be a secret for long.
And remember next time you see the word ‘secret’ in the title of the book, this is what it really means: this book is about stuff you already know, could easily find out, or that is a load of rubbish, but if we put the word ‘secret’ in the title, maybe you’ll buy it.