A book came across my desk the other day: "Why Margaret Thatcher Matters." Curious title, I thought. Four hundred pages on why Maggie Thatcher matters? A woman who was prime minister of England 19 years ago? I'll go back to reading Henry Chang's "Year of the Dog," the disappointing sequel to his well-received first detective novel, "Chinatown Beat."
I am so sick of this tired concept, "Why Blah Blah Matters." If New Orleans really matters, as writer Tom Piazza argues in his book of the same name, then there would be no need to read, much less write, such a book - correct? If poetry matters so, as Jay Parini claims in "Why Poetry Matters," then why do we need a book stating the case? "This is a deeply personal book, the result of a long reflection on the art of poetry," yadda yadda yadda, Parini explains in a canned interview on the book's website.
The whole venture make me suspicious; maybe poetry, love, religion, God, Darwin, and - yes, of course there is a book titled "Why Matter Matters" - don't really matter after all. "Why Poetry Can Be Safely Ignored." Now there is a book I would read.
Business writer William Holstein just published "Why GM Matters," arguing forcefully for the continued existence of America's largest car maker. Too forcefully, the Wall Street Journal reviewer thought: "Mr. Holstein seems to have become a captive of GM's corporate thinking." Holstein told me he considered "Does GM Matter?" as a possible title, "but we concluded that we wanted a more positive assertion."
But his book only intensifies my suspicion that maybe GM doesn't matter very much. Unlike Ford, it has never come close to selling me a car. I flew Eastern Airlines when it was in bankruptcy; if it worked for them, why not for GM? I fear that inevitably, someone, somewhere has a modest advance to write the book, "Why Newspapers Matter." The minute that gets published, we can all close the doors, turn out the lights, and go home.
The original Mattermacher was John Donatich, now the head of the Yale University Press. In 2002, Donatich published Christopher Hitchens's "Why Orwell Matters," which made the New York Times bestseller list. (The British publisher changed the title to "Orwell's Victory.") "That was an excellent book, and yes, it has been much imitated since," Donatich admits.
Especially by him! Yale plans to publish as many as 15 "Why Blah Blah Matters" books, embracing such subjects as architecture, the Dreyfus Affair, Africa (!), and Shakespeare (!!). As part of the series, former Economist editor Anthony Gottlieb will pen the irresistibly titled "Why Nothing Matters."
"Why Blah Blah Matters" has spawned its own ubiquitous subgenre, the book that takes an absurd proposition and then tacks ". . .and Why It Matters" onto the title. My favorite example:"The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters." That title fuses two hoary publishing cliches: (1) "The Blah Blah Wars"; (2) "What We Talk About When We Talk About Blah Blah"; with two ridiculous suppositions: (1) That "we" talk about hip-hop (sample lyric: "one in the chamber/32 in the clip/[bad word deleted] better strip") and (2) That hip-hop matters. I can't wait to read it.
A casual search of
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
