The ME in HOMETOWN: an autobiographical photo tour of small-town Ontario

Growing up within driving distance of North America’s third largest metropolitan city, there are many people who, when asked “where are you from,” just say “Toronto”. It is easier that way. Rather than having to explain where Guelph is in relation to the Big City, and where your small town is in relation to that, you just say you’re from Toronto. As urban sprawl has continued to consume more and more communities into the “Greater Toronto Area,” it is no longer that inaccurate either. And besides, chances are the person you are speaking to was just asking to be polite – they likely don’t care all that much anyway. Of course, other communities in the region are beginning to make a name for themselves outside of the Ontario bubble. Someone from my small town nowadays may well say they are from Waterloo, which has become known for its growing tech and startup communities.

I am not from Toronto. I am not from Waterloo. I am not from Guelph.

I am from Fergus.

Emblems of Fergus’ Scottish heritage are everywhere. Tributes to the many freed slaves who were among the area’s first settlers are decidedly fewer.

Being from Fergus is as essential to who I am as my name, or the colour of my eyes, or the way my voice sounds. Fergus made me. I am not just from Fergus; I am of Fergus. When my parents moved us in a few weeks after I was born in 1991, Fergus was barely more than a village of 8,000 people. In the 27 years since, the population has more than doubled (more than 20,000 at last count), and I have grown with it. I haven’t lived in Fergus full-time for a number of years now – first leaving for school, then work, then marriage – but I still feel daily the impact that growing up there had on my personhood.

I would like to take you on a tour, if you’ll come. Not a tour of Fergus, per se – though there are some excellent historical walking tours available if you are ever in town. I want to take you on a tour of my Fergus – the Fergus of my memory. I will do no fact-checking, present no history nor anthropology. If you are interested in those sorts of things, the town seems to have a fairly complete Wikipedia page. My goal is not to educate or drive tourism. This is not a list of Places To Stay or Things To Do. This is my hometown – the one that made me who I am – the way I remember it.

Our first family home was here, on Philip Court.

This is where it all began. Philip Court – the street I grew up on. The trees are bigger now. Our first house is just down the road, on the right. From here, my universe expanded. First our house, then the yard, then the street, the neighbourhood, the town itself. There’s never traffic on a road to nowhere, so my brother and I were safe to play up and down the street with the kids of the other young families who had all moved in together as development was completed. In the winter, I can remember the plow piling snow on the raised circle in the middle of the court, creating a mountain beyond our wildest imagination. Today, kids are probably discouraged from tunneling into large piles of snow, for fear of collapse; but back then, we turned that mountain into an anthill of caves and passageways, and stayed out until the lights came on. I didn’t learn what it was to be a neighbour from Mr Rogers; I learned it here, where everyone knew and looked out for one another.

This may be the first trail I ever “hiked”.

This walking trail passes by the old neighbourhood. At some point, it runs (or ran, once) through a dense thicket of trees and brush. That section of the path may have run all of 20 metres from end to end. Based on the omnipresent trash that littered the spot, it was probably a popular hangout for teenagers at the time; I don’t think I was ever there at night to find out for sure. But whenever we walked as a family, we insisted on taking the path, so we could walk through this magical fairy forest just down the road. Most of the stories and games we imagined as kids can find their roots among those trees.

The facade is crumbling and the grass is overgrown at the original St Joseph’s Catholic Church

This is the church where I was baptized, and which we attended every Sunday until it got to be too small and a new one was built. The church parking lot was a social hub; here we planned many impromptu sleepovers, sprung on our parents after mass and completely throwing off their Sunday plans. One Sunday a month, there were cookies in the parish hall. I always thought it was a little spooky that there were unmarked pioneer graves nearby.

By my count, I must have spent more than 10,000 hours in this building over 9 years.

Of course, the majority of my waking hours growing up seemed to be spent at school. My mom even taught here for the first couple of years, until my second brother was born and she decided to take some time off with three (eventually four) young kids at home. I could tell a million stories of friendships that began here (and continue to today), or teachers whom I idolized (and still do), or of course the lessons learned (and some forgotten); I was undoubtedly and indelibly shaped by all of these. My most vivid childhood memory took place here, though, and had little at all to do with school.

I remember with picture-perfect clarity a morning over 20 years ago – I must have been in kindergarten or shortly thereafter. My dad drove me to school, and I did not remember until we pulled into the parking lot that I had show-and-tell that day. There was no time to go back home and find some precious item for me to share. My dad, being resourceful, pulled a large photo plaque out of the back of the car. It showed a mountain slope covered in fresh, powdery snow; skiers had descended the mountain in pairs, carving perfect patterns of criss-crossing curves down the steep incline. It was an interesting photo, and my dad explained how it was created and offered it to me to show the class. I said thanks (or at least I hope I did) but declined. I would just tell my teacher I had forgotten, and bring something the next time. I said goodbye, and immediately felt a wave of devastation wash over me as he drove away. I felt ashamed and overwhelmed with sadness that I had turned down the picture. It suddenly occurred to me that it may have been my dad’s prized possession (it wasn’t) or something he was really excited to share with me (I’m pretty sure it was just quick problem solving), and I had rejected it out of hand. I may have been 6 at the time, but I can still feel the dread and shame I felt the rest of that day that I may have made my father sad. I still get a lump in my throat writing about it now. I think about that morning more often than is believable. I have never talked to him about it – I don’t even know that he would remember. But it is seared into my memory like a brand. That one story probably says more about me than anything else I will write here.

The Fergus library: safehouse, seat of all knowledge, shelter from the elements.

The first place I can ever remember walking by myself (besides school – and the first time I walked there alone I believe I got lost) is the library. They have remodeled the inside  since I moved away, but the outside is still the same; perks of being an historic landmark. The library was air conditioned, which our house never was. I remember walking downtown in the morning on a hot summer day to find a book (or six), and not wanting to leave the cool oasis of the library. I would sit and read an entire book in an old leather chair through the height of the afternoon heat, and then as the evening cooled off I would check out the rest of my stack and walk home. It is a testament to both my parents and Fergus itself that in those days before cell phones, if I told my mom I was going to the library and then didn’t come home for hours, there was never any panic. At least none I knew of.

Before it was a marketplace, it was just a market – the greatest in the world

This old foundry building used to house the Fergus Market. It has been converted into self-contained shops now, but back in the day it housed wonders. I have nothing against the current tenants of course, but to my knowledge none of them sell pewter wizards or steam-emitting dragons or farm-fresh meats, or that holiest of grails: hockey cards. Somehow, the farmer’s market in our small town was home to not one but two collectibles vendors. I don’t ever remember having a formal “allowance” like some kids have – but there were few things my parents could leverage to motivate us more than a trip with dad to pick up a few packs of hockey cards, and spend the rest of the day trading, sorting, and admiring. My cards are still at my parents’ house (much to their chagrin) and will likely hit Kijiji soon. But the market is also gone, so it’s alright.

The scene of one of very few childhood traumas.

Of course, even the most idyllic of towns has an insidious side. In later grades, my friends and I were too old to take the bus to school, so we rode our bikes. I remember one day discovering that my bike, which I had left outside of the garage the night before, had been stolen. We never found it. In the meantime, I still had to get to school, so I rode my mom’s bike instead. One day, as my friends and I raced down this hill on the way home, the right pedal fell off. I remember time standing still as my forward momentum shifted sideways and I fell to the road, leaving most of the skin of my knee behind me on the pavement. The pain was agonizing, as was the dread of telling my mom I had broken her bike. My friends walked with me the rest of the way home as I bled into my sock. They are still among my closest friends today.

The sign and the books are all gone now.

I wrote a few months ago about visiting Roxanne’s Reflections, the local bookstore, for the last time before it closed. I won’t go into it again here – the sadness is still close to the surface. I drove past the other day – the space is now home to the reelection office for the local Progressive Conservative candidate in the upcoming provincial election. He’s a neighbour of my parents, and by all accounts a gentleman. The books are all gone, though.

The Grand Theatre, formerly the Theatre on the Grand. 70 years before it changed my life, it was opened as a movie house.

Second best for second last: my second home, the Fergus Grand Theatre. It got a facelift recently, restoring some of its original glory; to my eyes, it has never looked better. When I was nine, my mom signed me up for the local children’s drama club. This is one of a handful of truly pivotal moments around which the rest of my life orbits. I played basketball growing up, but I never dreamed of playing professionally, or even in college. But from the moment the stage lights hit me for the first time in this 250-seat theatre in Fergus, I was convinced that nothing else would ever bring me joy. Time, money, and life have a way of sobering dreams – I didn’t end up going to school for acting, I chose jobs over shows, and eventually I came to accept that performing was probably in the past for me. A few years ago, things came full circle as I got to return to the Grand to play Peter Pan, the role of a lifetime for me. If I never do another show, I will be happy knowing that my last play was that one, back where it all began.

I proposed, with a ring I bought at the local jewellery store, here beside the Grand River.

The last stop on a tour of my Fergus is here, on a small rock shelf beside a waterfall. This is where I proposed to my wife, Angela. She fell in love with Fergus as I fell in love with her; and even without the rose coloured glasses of sentimentalism, she loves it for so many of the same reasons I do. We hope, one day, that our lives will lead us back here as we look ahead to a family of our own. It seemed fitting, when I thought about how I wanted to ask her to marry me, that it should be here. In a way, I had shown her myself by showing her my Fergus. I was saying, “Here is where I’m from; here is who I am.” We were married a year and a half later, at the new church they built to replace the one that was too small.

I do hasten back, whenever I can.

I am not from Toronto, or Guelph, or Waterloo. I am from Fergus. To walk in my shoes, you have to walk here. It is changed and unchanged, timeless and yet intrinsically tied to a very specific time in my life. You can no longer grab a scoop of ice cream at the Cherry Bomb, or play 5-pin at the Fergus Bowling Lanes, or swim in the old outdoor pool; but those things existed, once, and still do for me. Fergus is my hometown. Maybe it’s like yours, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it was exactly as I remember, maybe it wasn’t. But when I hold a mirror up to that town, I see myself looking back.

Top 100 Book Lists: Observations from the echo chamber

Over the past month, I have evaluated four different “Top 100” book lists from four major media organizations:

• TIME’s 100 Greatest Young Adult Books
• PBS’s The Great American Read
• The Guardian’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time
• Amazon’s 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

At first, I simply wanted to see how many books I had read compared to lists of books I “should” read; however, in the spirit of being more critical and deliberate in my media consumption, I thought it might be worthwhile to also examine the composition of these sorts of lists. I came up with four data sets to pull from each list which would give me a fairly complete picture of the diversity (or lack) present in each list, and give me insight into the methodology of assembling a “Top 100” style list.

It is worth noting, I think, that none of these are “listicle” or “click-bait” style lists, as you would see produced by viral content factories like Buzzfeed. These lists were put together by news and media organizations who, ostensibly, embody responsible literary journalism. As we will see, that responsibility has been met or missed to various degrees. These lists also represent different genres of written works. I don’t mean to make an apples-to-apples comparison of how “Top 100 Children’s Books” lists are published; instead, I wanted to look at lists from a variety of genres to see how media outlets approach this kind of task more generally.

So, what did I use to evaluate the lists? How did each list fare? And what, if anything, can we learn about our reading and media consumption habits? Let’s dive in:

Criteria 1: Gender Representation Among Authors

The first data set I looked at across the four lists was how close they were to gender parity among the authors represented. Even in 2018, none of the four lists featured any gender non-binary authors, so we are strictly speaking male/female. While none of the lists quite reached parity, TIME came closest with 43 female authors. The Guardian, in its list of nonfiction books, had the worst disparity with only 19 women out of a total 102 authors.

The most women on any list was 43, from TIME’s 100 Greatest Young Adult Books.

How does this compare to gender representation within the publishing industry itself? The number of books published by men and women is notoriously difficult to quantify, primarily because so many books are being published, and there are so many ways to publish a book these days. One statistic that is measurable, though, is how many books by men and women are reviewed by literary journals each year. Vida is an organization for Women in Literary Arts, and they publish an annual study on precisely this statistic. Consistently, men make up an average of 66-70% of books reviewed in major journals like the New York Times Book Review and the London Review of Books. This is not surprising, as the same study found that men held jobs within those publications by roughly the same ratio. This average is also reflected across the four lists I reviewed. It seems that the only place where women outnumber men is in the publishing industry itself, with women reportedly making up 78% of publishing jobs in the United States.

If women make up greater than 50% of the population, why are books by women reviewed (and, let’s be honest, probably published) far less often? It is because repressive systems self-perpetuate. Men have been publishing (and voting and owning property and being paid a living wage and…) for centuries longer than women in Western society. Another study, this one by Tramp Press, found authors submitting manuscripts listed their literary influences as only 22% female – even though 40% of submitters were women. Female authors still find more inspiration from their male predecessors because there are more of them. Just as in every unjust system which has historically placed less value on women, it continues to take time to overcome the imbalance.

One final note: it is interesting that all three articles I found on gender imbalance in publishing are from the Guardian; yet when it came time to assemble their own Top 100 list, they had the worst female representation of the bunch.

Criteria 2: Racial Representation Among Authors

The same study that found 78% of jobs in publishing are held by women also noted than 79% of those jobs are held by white people. Thus it should hardly be surprising – if 79% of the people making decisions about what gets published are white – that books by people of colour are in shockingly low supply. The lack of diversity in publishing is well documented; a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that just 8% of children’s books in 2014 were written by non-white authors (the number grew to 12% in 2016). If these four lists are an accurate representation of their respective genres (YA fiction, nonfiction, adult fiction) then the numbers probably carry outside of children’s lit as well.

No list includes more than 17 people of colour among its authors.

Leading the pack in the category of racial diversity is PBS’s list for their Great American Read series with a whopping 17 people of colour represented. The Guardian, again the publisher of the widest range of articles on race in publishing, brings up the rear once again with a mere 7. As was the case with the gender disparity, people of colour are fighting an uphill battle against hundreds of years of zero diversity in publishing. They are also disadvantaged by the fact that these lists were published in America and the UK – where at best there is a historical lack of diversity, and at worst institutional and casual racism is at its worst since Jim Crow.

One of the commitments I made to myself at the beginning of the year was to do whatever I could, in my reading and purchasing habits, to support more diversity in publishing. The world is a more interesting, nuanced, fair, and lovely place when you step outside of the bubble of your daily lived experience, and try to understand things from the point of view of another. Stories, poems, words – these things have so much power to change the way we think and the way we understand the world; however, continuously reading stories, poems, and words that reinforce and reflect your own reality will change little. But even that is a privileged observation, because I have never felt there was a lack of stories that reflect my reality.

There is so much to navigate here, with this issue in particular. Everyone – everyone – should see themselves reflected in media. Representation matters. The only way this massive imbalance (that in no way reflects the racial diversity of readers) will begin to get better is if we make diversity a priority. It will take a conscious effort from both readers and publishers to give the spotlight to people of colour. As a white person who very much hopes to publish something, someday, everything tells me to hope for the status quo; things staying the way they have always been gives me a huge advantage by pure dumb luck of my birth. But I do not hope for that. The world is not short of white voices. I hope I have to fight like hell to get something published among a sea of diverse voices. And when it finally happens, I hope it is because I have written something worth reading, not because people who look like me get published 8 times as often.

Criteria 3: Cultural Diversity Among Authors

Despite their seemingly global titles (100 Greatest Young Adult Books, 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time, etc.), these are still lists assembled and published by American and British media. The curators of these lists have not read every book ever written in every language on earth; their choices are inescapably informed by their circumstances. American and English schools overwhelmingly teach American and English books, and adults generally continue to read what they read when they were young. It takes a conscious and concerted effort to seek out books from outside of your cultural upbringing – they are less available, in many cases both physically (ie- in bookstores) and linguistically (ie- a lack of translations). But titles like “The 100 Best Nonfiction Books We Have Ever Read, and We Grew Up In England” just don’t carry the same weight as “All Time”.

The Guardian’s list of nonfiction books wasn’t worth charting – they were all British or American

I don’t mean to imply that the compilers of these lists are not widely read, culturally. Amazon’s list presented books from 10 different cultural backgrounds (poorly and broadly defined on my part). But even on the most diverse list, 69% of the books were by American authors. This sort of Americentrism will always exist in American media; in the same way, I am sure that a list published by The Globe and Mail would contain more books by Canadian authors (I would be right). Media is a product of its environment breaking out of the reinforcement loop of promoting American books to an American audience would require a massive shift in prejudice and perception that is, frankly, unrealistic. However, I do think that, in lists like these – particularly from relatively responsible and respectable media organizations like those I featured –  there is an onus on the curator to be more thoughtful in the way these lists are compiled.

Assembling a list under a title including superlatives like “The 100 Greatest” or “All Time”, and proceeding to populate that list with books from a single culture, ethnicity, or gender does nothing but perpetuate the echo chamber. As I pointed out in most of the individual reviews, this sort of favouritism towards Anglo-American writing under globalist headings, when not examined and interrogated, sends a single message: of all the books ever written, nearly all the ones worth reading were written by people in two countries. In fact, China published drastically more books per year than any other country, while Great Britain does not publish significantly more annually than Japan. Looking at these lists, you would think Asia has no publishing industry at all.

There are a few ways I can see that publishers of these lists could confront the inherent bias in their compilation: either by being more explicit in their titles (PBS’s The Great American Read does this, to be fair), or else by speaking to why these sorts of regional and cultural biases exist. People in the developed world (particularly in the British and American Empires) have had access to two critical resources essential to publishing that others simply do not have: money and time. Relative wealth and social security, often at the expense of the cultures underrepresented on these lists, enable aspiring writers in America and Great Britain to take the time to write, and to get paid for it. Their publishing industries have thrived, perhaps to excess, because they are in the extraordinarily privileged position of being free to write for a living, if they can. To compose a list that so heavily features books written in the Anglophone “West” without acknowledging the deep-rooted biases that led to the imbalance is unfair to the hardship, beauty, and value in global literary traditions.

Criteria 4: Date of Publication

The final data set I pulled from the lists looked at a different type of diversity. I wanted to see how each list prioritized new material versus what are broadly called the “classics”. I have expressed many times my feelings on the Canadian/American school system’s focus on classic literature. I think there is certainly a balance to be struck – a proper understanding of literature today relies on an understanding of its predecessors – but I think that most curricula today are still far from balanced. Most of the books I read in high school are the same books my parents read in high school; and even back then, they were “classics”. In the same way that Anglo-centric lists create the false impression that the only books worth reading were written in English, “Classic”-centric lists (whether Top 100 lists or high school syllabi) create the impression that the only books worth reading were written over 50 years ago. So, did these particular lists avoid that trap?

TIME’s list of Young Adult books had the greatest percentage of books written since 2000, which makes sense based on the boom that the YA industry has experienced in what we could fairly call “the Age of Harry Potter”. The most balanced list overall, in terms of relative distribution across all eras, was actually PBS’s Great American Read. PBS also gives the most insight into how its list was compiled; they asked 7,200 Americans what their favourite book was, and pulled the results from that poll. Assuming that they used due diligence to ensure a representative sample of the larger US population participated in the survey, it makes sense that the books included would be as diverse as readers themselves, spanning every epoch of (still mostly white, male, and American) writing.

The Guardian’s list of nonfiction appears to be nearly the inverse of the other lists, with 47% of the books on that list being written before 1900. But to be fair to the Guardian list, nonfiction was the dominant form of writing for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before literature and fiction overtook it. Because of this, they suffer a bit from being placed on the same scale as the other lists – the 47% represents a long and varied intellectual tradition that cannot easily be compared to the 20th century fiction heavily features on the other three.

So what?

What does any of this matter? Was it worth the excessive number of hours I put into all of this? Can we really learn anything of use from examining lists? I think we can. Here are my takeaways, and feel free to add your own (or your criticisms of mine!) in comments:

• We live in an echo chamber. We read what is familiar to us, which makes books (and poems and articles and movies and television shows) that represent our established point of view more successful. The more successful and pervasive a piece of work becomes, the more likely it is to end up on a list like this – where it is referred to still more consumers, making it more popular and further reinforcing the status quo.
• Representation matters. Today, in 2018, we still are not doing enough to ensure that everyone, regardless of how they identify themselves, sees themselves celebrated in literature and popular culture more broadly.
• Motive matters too. Brittany at Perfectly Tolerable, who originally brought the Amazon list to my attention, made a great point in the comments on that post which I had never considered. Another important element to look at is whether the publisher of the list stands to gain anything by what they include on the list. In the case of three of the lists, the answer is presumably (hopefully) no. But in the case of the Amazon list, Amazon is A RETAILER OF BOOKS. So of course they stand to gain from publishing a list titled “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and then including purchase links to the Amazon page for each and every one of those 100 books.
• It is worth the effort. As I have said, I made a personal commitment to read more diversely and more conscientiously this year. This exploration of the way that the media encourages people to read (ultimately, these lists serve as recommendations) has only served to harden my resolve to do what little I can do to find voices and works that challenge my point of view instead of reinforcing it. Reading comfortably only promotes complacency, and I will not be complacent.

One more thing…

Of course, there is one more thing – the thing I set out to do in the first place. I was inspired by Thrice Read, when I started this whole thing, to take a look at my own reading history against these lists. How did I do?:

• TIME: 43/100
• PBS: 54/100
• The Guardian: 28/100
• Amazon: 40/100

Amazon’s “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime”

This is the last of the four “Top 100” book lists I am measuring against my own reading history. I am planning to put together a short summary post to compare my findings across the four lists, and to see whether we can make any overarching observations about literary journalism as a result. But first, we have one more list to examine! As with the TIME, PBS, and Guardian lists, this is a list put out by a major media organization (Amazon); however, unlike those other lists, nowhere do the Amazon Books editors use a superlative. There is no “best” or “greatest” or “most-loved” being claimed here. This list, according to its title, is simply a group of experts’ recommendations on the 100 books one should read in their lifetime. The value of this list will rest squarely on that word “should.” My hope, at the outset of this list, is that they have taken the liberty of subjectivity to curate a list representative of the world we live in today. I hope Amazon believes people “should” read widely and diversely – from every genre, by authors from every part of the gender and racial spectra. Let’s take a look at how their list breaks down, and how many books I have left to read in my lifetime:

• 68 of the books on this list were written by men, versus 32 by women. This is only better than The Guardian’s list in terms of gender parity; both TIME and PBS have more women represented. This is a bit disappointing – again, given the loose parameters of “books you should read,” my hope was that Amazon would recommend something close to an even split. Better yet, I would have loved to see some non-binary representation this time around.
• Of all four lists I have examined, the Amazon list has the most culturally (if not racially, as we will see) diverse representation yet. 69 of the books were written by American authors, which is still high in the scope of all literature ever written; however, I have come to accept that lists published in America will always lean American. What is more encouraging is the cultural diversity of the other 31: writers are represented from Britain (15), continental Europe (6), Canada (2), Africa (2), Latin America (2), Asia (1), Australia (1), the Middle East (1) and the Caribbean (1). The other three lists saw combinations of these, but no other list represented such a broad spectrum of cultures. Good on you, Amazon.
• The chronology of the books on this list are encouraging to me, in that they reinforce an idea that I have argued many times before – that the classics, while great, are not the only books worth reading. Only 3 books written before the 20th century make the cut; and the closer you get to the present day, the more books Amazon thinks you should read. This is refreshing, when compared to so many must-read lists and high school English syllabi. Here is how the numbers look:
  • Pre-1900: 3
  • 1900-1939: 8
  • 1940-1959: 15
  • 1960-1979: 22
  • 1980-1999: 22
  • 2000-present: 30
• Finally, 85 of the 100 books were written by white authors. This is second best of all the lists we have examined, behind only PBS’s Great American Read; that being said, 15 books written by people of colour is not enough. I resolved at the beginning of this year to read more diversely, and to contribute in any small way I could to help more diverse voices be heard and recognized. This is where I think Amazon came up short. They gave themselves all the license in the world with a title like “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime”; they had no obligation to include so many of the old standards. They had an opportunity to say something about the importance of empathy, of differences in perspective and experience. Instead, they played it safe. So let me say unequivocally what Amazon did not: representation matters, and people of colour write words worth reading. Read them.
  

Here is the list in alphabetical order. How many have I read?:

Title	Read?
1. 1984	Yes
2. A Brief History of Time	No
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	No
4. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier	No
5. The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events)	Yes
6. A Wrinkle In Time	Yes
7. Alice Munro: Selected Short Stories	No
8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass	Yes
9. All the President’s Men	No
10. Angela’s Ashes	No
11. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret	Yes
12. Bel Canto	No
13. Beloved	No
14. Born to Run	No
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory	No
16. Catch-22	Yes
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Yes
18. Charlotte’s Web	Yes
19. Cutting For Stone	No
20. Daring Greatly	No
21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid	No
22. Dune	Yes
23. Fahrenheit 451	Yes
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas	Yes
25. Gone Girl	No
26. Goodnight Moon	Yes
27. Great Expectations	Yes
28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies	No
29. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone	Yes
30. In Cold Blood	Yes
31. Interpreter of Maladies	No
32. Invisible Man	No
33. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth	No
34. Kitchen Confidential	No
35. Life After Life	No
36. Little House on the Prairie	No
37. Lolita	Yes
38. Love in the Time of Cholera	Yes
39. Love Medicine	No
40. Man’s Search For Meaning	No
41. Me Talk Pretty One Day	No
42. Middlesex	No
43. Midnight’s Children	No
44. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game	No
45. Of Human Bondage	No
46. On The Road	Yes
47. Out of Africa	No
48. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood	No
49. Portnoy’s Complaint	No
50. Pride and Prejudice	Yes
51. Silent Spring	No
52. Slaughterhouse-Five	Yes
53. Team of Rivals	No
54. The Age of Innocence	No
55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay	No
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X	No
57. The Book Thief	Yes
58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Yes
59. The Catcher in the Rye	Yes
60. The Color of Water	No
61. The Corrections	Yes
62. The Devil in the White City	No
63. The Diary of a Young Girl	Yes
64. The Fault in Our Stars	Yes
65. The Giver	Yes
66. The Golden Compass	Yes
67. The Great Gatsby	Yes
68. The Handmaid’s Tale	Yes
69. The House at Pooh Corner	No
70. The Hunger Games	Yes
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	No
72. The Liars’ Club	No
73. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson series)	No
74. The Little Prince	Yes
75. The Long Goodbye	No
76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11	No
77. The Lord of the Rings	Yes
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat	No
79. The Omnivore’s Dilemma	No
80. The Phantom Tollbooth	No
81. The Poisonwood Bible	Yes
82. The Power Broker	No
83. The Right Stuff	No
84. The Road	No
85. The Secret History	No
86. The Shining	Yes
87. The Stranger	No
88. The Sun Also Rises	No
89. The Things They Carried	No
90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar	Yes
91. The Wind in the Willows	Yes
92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	No
93. The World According to Garp	No
94. The Year of Magical Thinking	No
95. Things Fall Apart	No
96. To Kill A Mockingbird	Yes
97. Unbroken	No
98. Valley of the Dolls	No
99. Where the Sidewalk Ends	Yes
100. Where the Wild Things Are	Yes

I have read 40 of the 100 books Amazon believes I should read in my lifetime. If I maintain my current pace, I should finish them all by the time I’m 65. Of course, there is a good chance that more books will have been written between now and then that I should probably read as well… Oh well. All I can do is my best. A big thanks to the women at Thrice Read for inspiring this project, and Perfectly Tolerable for putting the Amazon list on my radar. Now to take a step back and see if we have learned anything over the course of 4 lists…

What do you think of this latest “Top 100” list? Let me know in comments how many YOU have read!

The Guardian’s “100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time”

This is the third of four posts I am writing to examine the composition of “Top 100” lists in literary journalism. Be sure to go back and check out my analysis of TIME’s 100 Best Young Adult Books and PBS’s list for their Great American Read competition. Inspired by tags on Thrice Read, I wanted to measure my own reading history as compared to these sorts of “all time” lists. Of course, terms like “best” and “greatest” are entirely subjective, as opposed to measurable factors like copies sold – thus, each of the lists I am examining are shaped by their compilers, their media outlet or publication, and the society from which they are written. But subjectivity cannot be allowed to excuse prejudice, or ignorance, or laziness. As I have written many times this year, in today’s polarized world, it is more critical than ever that we are critical of the things we consume. Our media, our time, and even our reading habits should be put under the microscope. The loudest voices are not always right. In fact, Dunning-Kruger would suggest the exact opposite. So when a major media source like TIME or PBS, or in this case The Guardian, puts out a list of the “Top 100” books in a given category, I think we all owe it to ourselves to look deeper at the way these lists challenge or reinforce our biases. I am still interested in how well read The Guardian deems me to be, and I will take a tally below; but first, some numbers on “the 100 best nonfiction books of all time,” according to The Guardian:

• 83 authors represented are men, 19 are women. Tales From Shakespeare was written by both Charles and Mary Lamb, and The Elements of Style was written by two men – hence the total of 102. This gender disparity is the worst of any list I have looked at so far, but as we are about to see, diversity was far from the methodology here.
• It is pointless, in this case, to look at the cultural and linguistic diversity of the list; all of these books are written in English. The notable omissions of sacred texts from non-Christian religions, or other hugely influential books like The Diary of Anne Frank, The Art of War, On the Interpretation of Dreams, Discourse on Method, or The Kama Sutra, or any of the great works of Greek philosophy make the entire enterprise somewhat suspect. If The Guardian had wanted to make a list of “the 100 Best Nonfiction Books in the English Language,” they should have said that. Implying that your list contains the greatest books of all time, and only including works written in English, is deceptive and demeaning to countless intellectual traditions outside of Britain and America.
• A look at the chronology of the books (again, the fact that no book on the list was written before 1600 C.E. brings into serious question the “All Time” aspect of things):
  • 21st Century: 2
  • 20th Century: 51
  • 19th Century: 20
  • 18th Century: 16
  • 17th Century: 11
• Finally, 93 of the 100 books were written by white authors. A mere 7 books in the history of nonfiction written by people of colour were worth mentioning here, according to The Guardian. Again, the focus on English language works creates much of the problem here, as people of colour have only been viewed as people and not property for 150 years in much of the English speaking world. But if multiple collections of poetry make the nonfiction list, surely there is a place for Maya Angelou or Langston Hughes? Representation matters, and this list is bad at it.

Here is the list in reverse chronological order. How many have I read?:

Title	Read?
1. The Sixth Extinction	No
2. The Year of Magical Thinking	No
3. No Logo	Yes
4. Birthday Letters	No
5. Dreams From My Father	No
6. A Brief History of Time	No
7. The Right Stuff	No
8. Orientalism	No
9. Dispatches	No
10. The Selfish Gene	No
11. North	No
12. Awakenings	No
13. The Female Eunuch	No
14. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom	No
15. The Double Helix	No
16. Against Interpretation	No
17. Ariel	Yes
18. The Feminine Mystique	No
19. The Making of the English Working Class	No
20. Silent Spring	No
21. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	No
22. A Grief Observed	Yes
23. The Elements of Style	Yes
24. The Affluent Society	No
25. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life	No
26. Notes of a Native Son	No
27. The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art	No
28. The Hedgehog and the Fox	No
29. Waiting For Godot	Yes
30. A Book of Mediterranean Food	No
31. The Great Tradition	No
32. The Last Days of Hitler	Yes
33. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care	No
34. Hiroshima	No
35. The Open Society and Its Enemies	No
36. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth	No
37. How to Cook a Wolf	No
38. Enemies of Promise	No
39. The Road to Wigan Pier	No
40. The Road to Oxiana	No
41. How to Win Friends and Influence People	No
42. Testament of Youth	No
43. My Early Life: A Roving Commission	No
44. Goodbye to All That	No
45. A Room of One’s Own	Yes
46. The Waste Land	Yes
47. Ten Days That Shook The World	No
48. The Economic Consequences of Peace	Yes
49. The American Language	No
50. Eminent Victorians	No
51. The Souls of Black Folk	No
52. De Profundis	No
53. The Varieties of Religious Experience	No
54. Brief Lives	No
55. Personal Memoirs (Ulysses S Grant)	No
56. Life on the Mississippi	No
57. Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes	No
58. Nonsense Songs	No
59. Culture and Anarchy	No
60. On the Origin of Species	Yes
61. On Liberty	Yes
62. The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands	No
63. The Life of Charlotte Bronte	No
64. Walden	Yes
65. Thesaurus	Yes?
66. London Labour and the London Poor	No
67. Household Education	No
68. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave	Yes
69. Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)	Yes
70. Domestic Manners of the Americans	No
71. An American Dictionary of the English Language	Yes?
72. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater	No
73. Tales From Shakespeare	Yes
74. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa	No
75. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin	No
76. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	No
77. The Life of Samuel Johnson LLD	No
78. Reflections on the Revolution in France	Yes
79. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano	No
80. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne	No
81. The Federalist Papers	Yes
82. The Diary of Fanny Burney	No
83. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	Yes
84. The Wealth of Nations	Yes
85. Common Sense	Yes
86. A Dictionary of the English Language	Yes?
87. A Treatise of Human Nature	Yes
88. A Modest Proposal	No
89. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain	No
90. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding	Yes
91. The Book of Common Prayer	No
92. The Diary of Samuel Pepys	No
93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk	No
94. Leviathan	Yes
95. Areopagitica	No
96. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions	No
97. The First Folio	Yes
98. The Anatomy of Melancholy	No
99. The History of the World	No
100. The King James Bible	Yes

28 out of 100 – and I am shocked it is that high. I fully expect that my reading percentage on this list will be the lowest of the four. Nonfiction has never held the same sway over me as fiction, and some of the books on this list are, though deserving of their place, fairly unapproachable in 2018. Also, there are two dictionaries and a thesaurus here – I counted myself as having “read” them, in that I have used them. I certainly have NOT read them cover-to-cover. Most of the nonfiction I read these days is narrative nonfiction or biography, neither of which is heavily represented here. Looking at the ones I haven’t read, and keeping in mind my goal of reading more diversely, I don’t think my number is going to go up much from here.

What do you think of this latest “Top 100” list? Let me know in comments how many YOU have read!