Which is why I haven’t posted since Wednesday. But I’m taking a moment to pair up these three linked topics about what we read and what we should read.
First, KT Bradford has a reading challenge: for the next year, stop reading fiction by straight white men and look for books by other authors (she offers some suggestions). While some of the articles I’ve seen in response focus on the call for diversity, or treat it as an eat-your-spinach-it’s-good-for-you move, Bradford is quite clear this is about entertainment: she’d been increasingly dissatisfied with the stories she was reading and thought the switch to a non SWM perspective might be more satisfying (she says it was). And while I’m not taking up the challenge, there’s no question a year of NK Jemisin, Naomi Novik and older writers such as Brackett and Norton would certainly be entertaining.
John Scalzi discusses the challenge and says no, he’s not worried that a dearth of people reading straight white men will destroy his career. Foz Meadows vents about a critical column that argues it’s just not possible to figure out if an author’s gay and maybe not whether they’re non-white, so what’s the point? This would have made sense to me 40 years ago—as a teen reader I had no idea Samuel Delaney was a gay black man—but in the age of the Internet it’s not that hard.
Moving to topic two, we have Ruth Graham at Salon (not a direct link, I’m not giving her the clicks) who wrings her hands over adults reading YA, and doing so without even a little bit of embarrassment. Because dammit, it’s not literary, like the stuff they should be reading, for their own good (Graham does come off a bit eat-your-spinach in all this): ” if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.” The real issue being that YA has satisfying endings, whether tragic or happy; good literature has has ambiguous endings and complexity and unsettles you.
As iO9 points out, there’s no particular reason to stigmatize YA over this: lots of adult fiction has neat, tidy endings and isn’t that complex. Graham’s sneering at it much the way Lynn Shepherd dismisses JK Rowling’s work and tut-tuts that adults aren’t reading grown-up adult books instead. It’s the kind of genre shaming (though iO9 points out “Young adult” isn’t a genre as much as a marketing category) fantasy and SF fans are used to, romance fans too.
It also strikes me that Graham offers no proof for her underlying assumption, that the seductiveness of Y/A is luring adults away from Good Books. Some of the fans may be people who wouldn’t otherwise read anything. Or would be reading adult romance novels, fantasy novels, etc. The odds are many of the readers wouldn’t be turning to the Deep Thoughts Graham loves anyway—most people opt for the more entertaining side of fiction (based purely on subjective observance, I don’t have hard stats either). Or (gasp!) it could be they read East of Eden and Chaucer, then pick up Hunger Games. Why not?
And for number three, my new And column, on the conservative meme that the success of Fifty Shades of Grey proves feminism is dead
I find it fascinating, this whole concept of “genre-shaming.” It’s nothing more than literary snobbery, which as you point out, SF fans are well familiar with. I love YA. I’m also enjoying The Grapes of Wrath right now. It bemuses me that anyone would spend time criticizing other’s reading habits–these are the same category of people who also criticize me as an “amateur” writer, I’m sure (doubly so–I write speculative fiction! For young adults!).
There’s also a lot of snobbery targeted at Y/A or kid stuff that’s purely entertainment instead of raising Deep Questions or teaching Serious Issues. I was surprised Graham didn’t go there, then I realized she probably considers Serious Y/A an oxymoron.