Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun keeps its finger on the pulse of the left-leaning, literary-minded blogosphere so you don’t have to. The topic blowing up the tubes last month was a dustup that came to be known (”illogically,” as Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke put it) as “Franzenfreude.” This NPR piece explains it well enough, but here’s the Readers’ Digest version: critically acclaimed white male author gets near-universal adoration for latest novel, prolific though less critically acclaimed female authors call bullshit on the entire literary establishment for unspoken gender bias. Discuss.

As you can see from that Google search, the whole thing generated quite a bit of discussion and soul-searching. I mean, what if Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner are right? What if publishers, editors, and critics are just treating female writers, as a whole, less seriously than their male counterparts? Only the most paranoid conspiracy theorist would presume that there was some systematic conspiracy against female writers, but that only makes the problem more insidious. If there’s no boogeyman to vanquish, if there’s actually just something ingrained and unconscious at work, what are we, the reading public, to do about it?

Guest-writing at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog back in August, Chris Jackson, an editor at the publishing house Spiegel and Grau, wrote what I thought was a very honest and pragmatic piece about his reaction to being confronted with this unconscious prejudice. (And was treated to what I thought was a nit-picky and sort of unfair rebuttal from Alyss Dixson. I wanted to reach into the Internets, grab everyone, and say “Same team, guys! Same team!”)

Basically, the pragmatic endeavor that Jackson decided to try out was to balance his reading: for every piece of fiction he read written by a man, he would read a piece of fiction by a woman. Now, Jackson is an actual book editor, so he can have a proactive role in alleviating any injustices he sees in the publishing world. But for a regular, white, male reader hoping to stay on the straight and narrow path to enlightenment, consciously making the effort to read more female authors seems like a good idea (in addition to, you know, doing my best to treat folks equitably, being mindful of history, and putting myself in other people’s [especially women's] shoes). Once I finished Jackson’s piece, I thought of my own reading. And while I think I do better than a lot of guys when it comes to reading female authors (not looking for a pat on the back here, but two of my three favorite books ever were written by women, ahem), my ratio is certainly not 50-50. I knew that off the top of my head.

All of this thinking about the books I’ve read made me want to actually like, look closer at the books I’ve read. Since I’ve always been a shameless self-promoter, I decided to do it in the most evocative way possible and turn it into a blog-related activity. So in addition to making a concerted effort to alternate my male-written and female-written reading (I just picked up White Teeth by Zadie Smith), I’m going to take a look at my own literary history by examining the contents of my bookshelf.

I don’t necessarily believe that you can tell a lot about a person from their bookshelf. (Although I am guilty of often scanning the shelves wherever I go. It’s a reflex!) For example, here’s a caveat about my bookshelf: I moved back to Jersey briefly after college. When I moved back up to Boston, I decided that I would bring some books with me. Not my favorite books, though. Instead, I brought up all the books that I half-read or didn’t bother reading in college. The reasoning being, if those were the only books I had in my possession, I would actually get around to reading them. You can imagine how that worked out. I just wound up buying new books or taking books out of the library that I actually wanted to read. The result is four shelves of a melange of books that I ignored in college, or read cover-to-cover, or received as gifts, or scanned briefly, or picked up at used bookshops. You can’t learn a ton about someone based on his bookshelf, but I bet you can learn something. Let’s find out what.

In the coming days, I’ll post a photo of one of my bookshelves, along with an annotated listing of all the books on it. I’ll try to say as much as I can, even about the books I haven’t read. And here’s where you come in, precious reader. If you want to join the fun and go through your own bookshelves, trying to paint a self-portrait of a reader, I’ll post your photos and notes here on the blog. It should be a good time!

Tags: books, Franzenfreude, I really have no idea how this is going to pan out, I'm a not great reader, Shelved

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Culture, Reading and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.