I hope you go out like summer; Blazing and glorified, Resplendent in self-assured coquetry, Nostalgic and prophetic,
Beautiful beyond the words of any poet But Gaia herself.
* I hope the memory of you crunches Underfoot through the hell of winter Like stained glass bones, Buried in the ground but not In the mind, Just inches away, beneath.
* I hope by spring you are worm food, All your crimsons browned and become Sedimentary, sedentary, Dead and buried, Feeding the birches we will burn For next autumn’s warmth.
Last year around this time, I made honest “new year’s resolutions” for the first time in my adult life. I tried to follow the advice of goal setting gurus: making them reasonable and achievable; blending short- and long-term timelines; balancing aspiration and realism. I put real care and consideration into a list of 10 items, and treated them as commitments to myself. Despite taking the enterprise seriously, I was still surprised at how helpful I actually found the exercise to be. I have never been a goal setter. This was unexplored territory to me. But checking in regularly with myself throughout the year (a year in which I faced more “big picture” life moments than perhaps any year previous) and weighing decisions against my resolutions actually helped me a great deal. As a new year rolls over once again, I want to revisit those goals – Socrates and the unexamined life and all that. I want to assess my success (or lack thereof), revise and recommit.
Looking Back
Here is how I did in 2018:
10. Go outside.
I began the year working in the sales job I had been in for a while, and I could feel the sedentary nature of office life slowly crushing me. There were days where it felt like I was drowning, where the lack of fresh air, creativity, and reprieve from stress would push me to crushing depths. Then, against all expectation, a dream opportunity presented itself. Just as I was reaching the inevitable impasse where I needed to leave my corporate job or risk real damage to my mental health, I was given the opportunity to go outside. I took a job coordinating the Outdoor Education program at the camp I had worked at growing up. Angela and I (in a moment of incredible support from my amazing wife) uprooted ourselves and moved with our dog to a children’s camp so that I could follow a lifelong dream. Immediately, so much felt better. I lost weight, I felt healthy, I breathed fresh air. I went outside.
9. Read more poetry.
I tried. I really did. I didn’t do well reading poetry anthologies or books (or books in general, really – of the measly 23 books I read in 2018, only 2 were books of poetry), but I tried to fill my “spaces” with more poetry. I followed a number of poetry accounts on Instagram and Twitter, so that as I indulged my media addiction and trudged through the cesspools of the social internet, I could at least count on the terrible news being broken up periodically with beauty. It has been a small measure, but it has helped.
8. Write more poetry.
This I did unequivocally. Admittedly, I am very much a novice poet. I wrote a few years ago about coming back to poetry after being turned off of it by the way it is taught in the Canadian school system. The delight that rediscovering poetry has brought me cannot be overstated. It is like candy for my soul. I am unfailingly poor at evaluating my own work, but I strongly suspect that most poetry I write is awful. I am never sure what to do with it – do I post it here? Do I continue to collect it and edit it in hopes that someday someone else might publish it? Do I just write for myself and let it live in Moleskine notebooks? I do not know. What I do know is that I wrote a fair bit this past year, and that I don’t want to stop.
7. Blog. Weekly.
As pleased I am with my success in my last goal, I am equally disappointed in my lack here. Granted, I could not see at the outset of last year the adventures that would be in store – the ways in which real life would simply take priority. I neglected blogging for many reasons. I was busy, I wrote other things, I felt I had nothing worthwhile to say. In the end, I don’t think having a regular posting schedule is particularly helpful for me. It works for some, no doubt. My lack of a cohesive theme or regular “series” of posts doesn’t play easily into posting with such regimented regularity. Certainly having more discipline around writing is something I need to work on if I ever want a real shot at writing professionally, but for now I think I am okay with posting in this space when I have something to say. That being said, I have a couple of projects in mind which I think this may in fact be the right space for, so I hope to have more content up in the coming months.
6. Recharge.
As I said above, I have seldom felt better. There are still days where I feel worn down by it all, and many days I am exhausted beyond belief – but in general, it is the exhaustion of having given myself to something I care deeply about. I had forgotten how good that can feel.
5. Be careful.
It is hard to measure the amount of care I have brought to relationships, decisions, and myself over the past year, but I am conscious of having tried. I have endeavoured to be literally “full of care” this year, and I hope I have succeeded.
4. Get something published.
As with writing, I feel that this particular goal fell victim to a lack of focus. I had every intention of resuming the practice of submitting things I have written to accepting publications, but I simply didn’t do it. Nobody can publish your writing if they don’t see it. If memory serves, I only tried to shop around a single piece this year (the Universal Language of Hide and Seek, which I ended up publishing here) and quickly became discouraged by its lack of an audience. As will become clear in my 2019 goals, I think that my best writing ultimately comes when I stop writing for an audience and simply write what I want to read. But I also need to do the work.
3. Listen to more diverse voices.
This is perhaps the goal which was most omnipresent in my mind throughout 2018. I wrote a series of posts early in the year examining the composition of “Top 100” book lists from major media organizations, and it was impossible to ignore the lack of diversity in what we typically associate with “greatness”. I have tried all year to seek out new and underrepresented voices to broaden my context and understanding, whether in media or literature or music and beyond. This is something I am committed to doing well beyond this year, as I can feel the marked difference it has made in my outlook.
2. Be content.
Contentment is the pervasive thread throughout any of the success I have found over the past year. Choosing happiness over status or wealth or complacency has sparked every positive change I have made these past months. Being content has enabled me to be other things as well – productive, present, and grateful.
1. Learn to say the sentence, “I don’t know enough about that to have formed an opinion.”
This is something I will continue to work on my whole life, and probably still never be as good at it as I should. In a world where anyone can find an audience online and shout their feelings into the void, it is extraordinarily difficult to show restraint. It is hard to take time to read the article instead of the headline, to find the middle path instead of choosing a side, to wait for enough data to make an informed decision. I will keep trying to find the humility and diplomacy to admit when I don’t have a strong enough opinion to defend, and to seek deeper arguments.
Looking Ahead
Having looked back, it is time to take what I have learned and look ahead. Here are the things I hope to accomplish, and the objectives to which I hope to hold myself, in 2019:
10. Recommit to reading.
9. Write something every day.
8. Get up early.
7. Create for myself, not a market.
6. Do fewer things with more care.
5. Check in.
4. Invest as much time into Canadian issues as I do American politics.
There is no surer way to guarantee that someone will hate a piece of literature than to make them read it in a high school English class. I have remarked before that I find it ludicrous that students today are still reading the same books my parents read as teenagers – not because there is anything wrong with the “classics,” but because sticking to the same early-20th century syllabus holds the dangerous implication that nothing worth reading has been written in sixty years. That combination of perceived “outdatedness” and being forced to analyze and scrutinize every theme, metaphor, and motif means that most books on a high school reading list don’t stand a chance. The way they are taught works against them, and leads to even the most avid, literary students to dread or even despise these books.
I was certainly no exception. I took to Shakespeare from an early age, but beyond that I can count on very few fingers the number of books I was forced to read in high school which I remember with any fondness. In fact, I harbour a deeper resentment for them than nearly anything else in my life – hating these books is an inherent part of me.
However.
Equally essential to me is a belief in two things: personal growth, and second chances. Nearly every “classic” novel that I have read on my own terms, based on my own interest, has been rewarding and enjoyable. And so I set out this year to reread the four books I hated most in high school, to see whether it was the books I hated, or simply the circumstance in which I read them. No spoilers, but I may owe my English teachers (some of whom read this blog) an apology. I still think some of these books are out of date, and would love to see more contemporary fiction studied in high school. But they may not be all bad.
Anyway. Here we go.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Why did I hate it in high school? Shortly before I read Lord of the Flies, I had also just read Gone With the Wind and A Tale of Two Cities for the first time, and loved them. The classics I read for pleasure and enjoyed were these monolithic tomes with intricate plots and huge casts of characters and endless pages of flowery language. In contrast, I remember feeling like Golding’s sparse, simple language and overt, universal themes were lazy, even beneath me.
Was I wrong? Absolutely. I was wrong. While I disagree with the Times review on the back of the copy I picked up at a thrift store, that “Mr Golding knows exactly what boys are like,” I will certainly concede that the author knows exactly what people are like. His sparse language is the language of children at play. Rereading this book at this exact moment in history felt almost too on-the-nose. This book about the beast at the heart of humanity, the liberation of hate granted by a mask and a crowd, and the feeling that somewhere along the line, we were playing a game that has become far too real; this book could just as easily have been written today as 1954. A more mature me, a little more broken by the world, wept with Ralph for the end of innocence.
Words I’ll remember:
“They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate.”
“If faces were different when lit from above or below – what was a face? What was anything?”
“…what makes things break up like they do?”
To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee
Why did I hate it in high school? At 15, I think I was too young to appreciate the importance of this book within the context of its time. Growing up in an overwhelmingly white, conservative, rural town in Canada, the realities of the Civil Rights Movement were simply not part of my upbringing. Canada’s own checkered racial history is, or at least was at the time, largely not covered in elementary and high school history class; US history, even less so. Being a well-read and knowledgeable adolescent, I was aware of the key figures and themes of that time; but I would say my awareness of the history of racial tension in America was seen more through the lens of Forrest Gump than Ken Burns. All this is to say, without the ability to truly appreciate the climate that this book was published into, its slow pace and ultimate ambiguity about justice, good, and evil bored me to tears.
Was I wrong? …No. I was right, in that I disliked the book then and still dislike it now, though my reasons are different. I get the book now. I understand why it belongs to that prestigious club who claim the title of “The Great American Novel”. I get how important and brave it must have felt to tell stories of a white man in Alabama standing up and supporting and defending and believing a black man. I can appreciate that. However, other things have surfaced with a second, adult reading that still hold me to my opinion of the book. First, the thing about The Great American Novel is, I truly believe it will never mean as much to someone who isn’t American. So much of the perceived gravity of this book is bound to its capital-G Greatness and capital-A American-ness, and as an outsider to the greatness of America, particularly today, that ignites no fire in me. And second, there are so many wonderful stories about blackness in America that have been told by black voices, and that do not feature an infinitely fair and just white man as the saviour of the black folk. While it is undoubtedly a product of its time, there is part of me that cannot help but feel that it belongs in its time, and that we have moved past the need to hear white people tell stories of white people confronting racism. It is beyond time to retire To Kill A Mockingbird, and replace it with more diverse stories of racial justice.
Didn’t stop me tearing up, though, just a little at, “Thank you for my children, Arthur.”
Words I’ll remember:
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
“Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.”
“Courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitzby Mordecai Richler
Why did I hate it in high school? The concept of the Great Canadian Novel is note nearly as prevalent as its counterpart to the south, but it still exists. Almost any list of the Great Canadian Novel will include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz alongside The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne of Green Gables. I went into this book with that expectation – that Richler would have something to say here about Canada and Canadianness that only a very few books have ever captured. In high school, I just didn’t find that to be the case. The limitations were my own, of course – an adolescent self-absorption and lack of empathy were the reason I couldn’t place myself in this story of Jewish youth in Montreal, not any fault in the writing. But as with many Great Novels, Canadian or otherwise, not very much happens; and so if you have a hard time identifying with anything in the story, it can seem to drag on to eternity. Even watching the Richard Dreyfuss film after we finished did nothing to redeem this one for me.
Was I wrong? Meh. I would say my second reading of Duddy was unremarkable. I didn’t hate it, and like To Kill A Mockingbird, I can understand much better now why it is held in such esteem. Perhaps it is once again a matter of expectations not matching up to reality. Of all the books I reread for this project, this is the one I most expected to like as an adult. Mordecai Richler is a notoriously good satirist. Duddy is billed most places as one of the greatest comedic works in Canadian literature. There is just the one nagging problem that, even through the generous lens of black comedy and satire, this book just isn’t funny. It is, in fact, wholly depressing. Well written? Definitely. More Canadian than I gave it credit for? Sure. Chock-full of morals and lessons? Irritatingly so. But funny? No, I dare say it is not.
Words I’ll remember:
“A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.”
Shades of Simon Grayby Joyce McDonald
Why did I hate it in high school? More than anything else, I just found this book dull. It seemed to me like a quintessential “book report book.” It was a book that tried to be deeper and more meaningful than it really was, and in which nothing of much substance actually happened. The copies we read (and the copy I read now, years later) have built-in study guides and reader-response questions in the back – a huge red flag for students. By the time I read Shades of Simon Gray, I had been rereading Lord of the Rings every year for a few years. I had read Gone With the Wind. I think I had even read Stephen King’s It. I was never naive enough to hope that books like the ones I was reading for fun would be on a syllabus, but I remember feeling like this one in particular was simply juvenile.
Was Iwrong? I must admit I was. In retrospect, this is probably the first modern YA novel I read (besides Harry Potter I suppose). Before I discovered John Green and Patrick Ness and Maureen Johnson, I was made to read this book in my Grade 9 English class. Reading it now, it has hallmarks of so many of the things I later came to love about YA fiction – a good mystery, layered characters, complicated morality. To be clear, it is far from amazing. The writing is mostly uninspired, the ending a little too “easy.” But it has merit for a reader at 14 that 14-year-old me would not give it. It navigates deftly between genres, finding a balance between contemporary realism, historical fiction, and light fantasy. Because of this, it probably appeals broadly enough to different students to be a fairly sophisticated choice for study. It was a nice bit of escapism; the whole thing took me about 3 hours to get through, and it was time I was happy to spend. I don’t regret revisiting it a bit.
Words I’ll remember:
“People, he realized, were a lot like drops of water caught up in the spring runoff, shuttled into fast-moving streams that collided into rivers and rushed to join the ocean. If you got caught in the current there was no turning back.”
“The branches, Simon, she whispered. Grab the branches.”
*****
What books did you have in high school? Have you ever reread a book and discovered you felt differently about it than before? If not, I encourage you to give it a try!
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 widestrange 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?:
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!
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!
Last week, inspired by Thrice Read, I took a look at the composition of TIME’s “100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time”. I crunched some numbers on the composition of the list, and took a look at how many of the 100 I have read. Since then, PBS has announced their list of 100 books entitled “The Great American Read“. They will be profiling “America’s 100 most-loved books” in a miniseries beginning in May, and then America will have a chance to vote on which book is “greatest”. As a Canadian, I don’t know that I will be able to vote – but I enjoyed reviewing TIME’s list so much that I thought I would do the same here! First, the numbers on PBS’ “The Great American Read”:
67 of the books were written by men, 33 by women
62 of the books were written by American authors, 21 by English-speaking Europeans, 4 by Canadians, and 1 by an Australian. That leaves 12 books written by authors in Africa (2), Latin America (4), and non-English-speaking Europe (6). This distribution is slightly better than the TIME list, though of course it is still heavily skewed towards books written in English. Since this list is compiling “most-loved” books instead of “best,” I think that is understandable.
A look at the chronology of the books:
Pre-1900: 17
1900-1939: 10
1940-1959: 14
1960-1979: 13
1980-1999: 27
2000-present: 19
Finally, 83 of the 100 books were written by white authors. 17 books on PBS’ list were written by people of colour. Again, this is a slightly higher number than on TIME’S list of YA books, but still does not nearly represent the diversity of American readers. I am recommitting myself to reading more diversely – the more people who buy books by diverse authors, the more diverse authors will be given the opportunity to publish. Or at least the hope in me believes so.
Here is the list in alphabetical order. How many have I read?:
Rank and Title
Read?
1. 1984
Yes
2. A Confederacy of Dunces
Yes
3. A Prayer For Owen Meany
No
4. A Separate Peace
No
5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Yes
6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Yes
7. The Alchemist
Yes
8. Alex Cross Mysteries (Series)
No
9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Yes
10. Americanah
No
11. And Then There Were None
Yes
12. Anne of Green Gables
Yes
13. Another Country
No
14. Atlas Shrugged
Yes
15. Beloved
No
16. Bless Me, Ultima
No
17. The Book Thief
Yes
18. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Yes
19. The Call of the Wild
No
20. Catch-22
Yes
21. The Catcher in the Rye
Yes
22. Charlotte’s Web
Yes
23. The Chronicles of Narnia (Series)
Yes
24. Clan of the Cave Bear
No
25. Coldest Winter Ever
No
26. The Color Purple
Yes
27. The Count of Monte Cristo
Yes
28. Crime and Punishment
No
29. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Yes
30. The Da Vinci Code
Yes
31. Don Quixote
No
32. Doña Bárbára
No
33. Dune
Yes
34. Fifty Shades of Grey (Series)
No
35. Flowers in the Attic
No
36. Foundation (Series)
No
37. Frankenstein
Yes
38. Game of Thrones (Series)
No
39. Ghost
No
40. Gilead
No
41. The Giver
Yes
42. The Godfather
Yes
43. Gone Girl
No
44. Gone With the Wind
Yes
45. The Grapes of Wrath
Yes
46. Great Expectations
Yes
47. The Great Gatsby
Yes
48. Gulliver’s Travels
No
49. The Handmaid’s Tale
Yes
50. Harry Potter (Series)
Yes
51. Hatchet (Series)
Yes
52. Heart of Darkness
Yes
53. The Help
No
54. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Yes
55. The Hunger Games (Series)
Yes
56. The Hunt for Red October
No
57. The Intuitionist
No
58. Invisible Man
No
59. Jane Eyre
Yes
60. The Joy Luck Club
No
61. Jurassic Park
Yes
62. Left Behind (Series)
No
63. The Little Prince
Yes
64. Little Women
Yes
65. Lonesome Dove
No
66. Looking For Alaska
Yes
67. The Lord of the Rings (Series)
Yes
68. The Lovely Bones
Yes
69. The Martian
No
70. Memoirs of a Geisha
No
71. Mind Invaders
No
72. Moby-Dick
Yes
73. The Notebook
No
74. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Yes
75. Outlander (Series)
No
76. The Outsiders
Yes
77. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Yes
78. The Pilgrim’s Progress
No
79. The Pillars of the Earth
No
80. Pride and Prejudice
Yes
81. Ready Player One
No
82. Rebecca
Yes
83. The Shack
No
84. Siddartha
No
85. The Sirens of Titan
No
86. The Stand
Yes
87. The Sun Also Rises
No
88. Swan Song
No
89. Tales of the City (Series)
No
90. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Yes
91. Things Fall Apart
No
92. This Present Darkness
No
93. To Kill a Mockingbird
Yes
94. The Twilight Saga (Series)
Yes
95. War and Peace
Yes
96. Watchers
No
97. The Wheel of Time (Series)
Yes
98. Where the Red Fern Grows
Yes
99. White Teeth
No
100. Wuthering Heights
Yes
54 out of 100 – more than half! This is an… interesting list. PBS outlines on their website that the list was compiled using a survey of about 7,200 Americans, asking them simply to name their most-loved novel. There are a few inclusions here that baffle me (Mind Invaders is hardly even findable on Google) and leave real questions as to the diversity of their sample size. But again, framing the conversation in terms of “most-loved,” a completely subjective measure, gives them a lot of license to be unscientific.
What do you think of this latest “Top 100” list? Let me know in comments how many YOU have read!
John Green, YA author of such bestsellers as The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, is an immensely quotable guy. Between his novels, podcasts, and YouTube videos, John has written and spoken many words which people have subsequently turned into posters or t-shirts or Tumblr posts, or, as I have, permanently inscribed them on their bodies. One John Green-ism that I have been turning to often of late is his oft-repeated sentiment that “books belong to their readers.” He is not talking about the ownership of the physical book by the individual who purchases it, of course; he is referring to the idea that once a book is written, it no longer belongs to the author. Once it exists as a thing out there in the world, a book belongs to its audience.
John first offered this opinion in response to fans and readers asking for updates on what characters in his books would have done after the book was finished. Does Q ever see Margo again after the events of Paper Towns? What happens to Pudge now that Alaska is gone? John’s point is that those answers are not his to give; at least no more his than any other reader of the book. He wrote a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end – anything beyond that exists in the mind of the reader. It is part of the magic of reading, imagining the world beyond the pages and finding meaning for oneself beyond what the author “intended”. Authors should and often do leave white spaces around the edges for the reader to fill in themselves. Editors also help writers to figure out what is and what is not the story; if it is in the book but it is not the story, it gets cut. This is a crucial part of storytelling. The decision of what the story is, and what is not the story, is a deliberate one. In deciding not to tell a certain part of the story, the author is making a deliberate decision to allow the reader to fill that gap themselves, immersing them further into the world of the story. This is the nature of the relationship between author and reader – the author crafts a good story worth telling about characters who feel real, while the reader’s imagination fills in the blanks.
It is natural that this mutual investment between author and reader will create a longing in the latter to know what happens next. This longing is largely responsible for the phenomenon of “fan fiction,” wherein readers will actually write continuations or alternative versions of their favourite stories, often publishing them online for others to read. Active and imaginative fan fiction communities spring up around nearly every successful piece of fiction – and of course, the more connected readers feel to the worlds of these stories, the desire for more of that world gets stronger. Getting lost in a fictional universe is a delectable form of escape, and you can feel a real and profound sense of loss when you are forced to come back to reality when the book (or movie or television show) inevitably ends. Of course, you could just start again at the beginning, but you already know what happened; you want more, not again. John Green’s point is that the stories told in fan fiction, or the ones that simply exist in the mind of a reader, about what happens outside the confines of the actual story, are just as valid as any idea the author may have on the topic. Once the writer has told their story and given it to the reader, the power of the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks in a way that is most valuable to them is much more amazing than any further detail the author could provide.
The reason all of this has been on my mind lately is that there are two very notable (heck, maybe the two most notable) fictional worlds which seem to be absolutely devoted to ignoring this principle. I am speaking, of course, of Harry Potter and Star Wars.
In the case of Harry Potter, JK Rowling wrote a series of novels that have come to mean the world to an entire generation of young people (and quite a few not-so-young people). A deep sorrow settled over the Harry Potter fandom after the release of the seventh (and supposedly final) book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Fans of Rowling’s magical universe felt lost knowing that this was it – all of the stories they would ever hear about Harry had been told. Harry Potter has perhaps the largest fanfiction community in the world today, with novellas and musicals and songs and artwork being created even now, 11 years after Deathly Hallows was published; but even that vibrant, creative community could not satisfy fans’ desire to know what happened to their favourite characters. Unlike John Green, however, Rowling has obliged. In spades.
First there came Pottermore, a website built for Rowling to release regular updates and accompanying material, filling in perceived gaps in the books or else giving an official ruling by the author on events and details outside of the timeline of the novels. With each update and expansion of the “canon,” Rowling invalidates more and more of the imagination and creation of the readers of her books. Following John Green’s thinking, she gave the books to her readers and is now taking them back, piece by piece, intent on never giving up ownership of her story. Pottermore was not Rowling’s cardinal sin, however. That came in the form of a play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for which Rowling wrote the story, though the script was written by Jack Thorne. The script was released in book form so that fans who couldn’t see the play in London could still experience the canonical story of a grown up Harry, along with his friends and children. Not only does the play laugh in the face of the idea that readers have any ownership over a story, it is aggressively unlike the Potter than fans loved. As I said when I read it, none of it felt right. The characters did not sound, act, or feel like the characters that readers had gotten to know over the course of seven novels. Fans, myself included, had spent nine years wishing for more Potter – until it came, whereupon we wished we could take it back. It was not just that Cursed Child was bad; nothing Rowling released could have lived up to the magic of the world beyond the books that we had all built in our imaginations.
Star Wars, that other titan of storytelling, is also defying John Green’s wisdom of gifting a story to its readers (or in this case viewers); and while I don’t think Disney’s faults are as egregious in this matter, I think they are more overtly greedy. To be clear, I have no problem that they are still making Star Wars movies. George Lucas has talked about a series of nine films since the very beginning of Star Wars – heck, he started with Episode IV. And though many people have argued passionately that the filmmakers did to Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi what Rowling did to her characters in Cursed Child, this is not my concern either. What rubs me the wrong way, as a believer that stories belong to their audience, is the otherStar Wars movies that Disney is now pumping out at an alarming rate. Take Rogue One for instance. It was the first of the so-called “Star Wars Stories” – expanded universe films that tell stories outside of the main thread of the franchise. It tells the story of how the plans for the Death Star ended up in the hands of Princess Leia, leading to the Rebellion destroying the Empire. This was a story familiar to Star Wars fans, because it is mentioned in the very first film, Episode IV: A New Hope. According to rebel leader Mon Mothma, “many Bothans died to bring us this information.” When Lucas wrote that line, he intentionally left out the details. He made the conscious choice that it was more impactful to allow fans to imagine for themselves what it might mean that many Bothans had died in pursuit of the rebel cause. That was not the story he set out to tell. He left a blank space for the viewer to fill in themselves, bringing them into the story. Retrieving the plans was not the story he set out to tell. But Disney, as they are wont to do, saw an opportunity to add another movie to a tremendously lucrative franchise by filling in the blank and telling an official version of that story-that-is-not-the-story. And they are doing the same with Solo, and all of the other in-universe films they have announced. With every movie that is released to fill in the gaps in the main story of Star Wars, the imagination that viewers bring to the series is diminished. There are less blanks for them to fill in. They have less ownership over their own experience of the story, and become passive. A number on a profit sheet, a seat filled.
I may be wrong. Perhaps a piece of fiction is made more enjoyable, the more of it there is. But I tend to agree with John that a story is made more valuable when the storyteller relinquishes control to the audience; when they say, “I have told the story I set out to tell. You decide what happens next.”
*****
What do you prefer? Is there never enough of your favourite book or series, or would you rather imagine the stories beyond the pages yourself?
An Awfully Big Adventure 