Wordish Things
I started this post yesterday and then Bobby, who was playing Mario 3 or our NES, was like, "You should come in and play too!" and the Siren's call of nostalgic video games overwhelmed the urge to writing about books and writing.
First of all, I'm doing a Read Around the World challenge. I started it p-locked (and my list is still in-progress because I'm also trying to read a book set in each of the 50 U.S. states and have more to add than what I've listed so far) but am opening it up because 1) I'd love recommendations on what to read and 2) thought it might be useful for others who want to expand their reading horizons.
There's a lot of YA on the list, which is more an occupational hazard than a personal preference. Yes, there are many excellent YA books out there, but you won't hear me follow up with "just as good as books written for adults!" I still prefer immensely, as a general rule, books written for an adult audience.
When my position changed from "English language arts" to "humanities," I was left to determine how best to integrate the two content areas I'd be teaching, and the approach I ended up going with was to use literature from the culture, region, or time period we were learning about in the "social studies" half of my content area to hit my Reading Literature standards. I'd already been doing this as much as I could, even as an English teacher; the idea of reading a work of literature without cultural or historical context has always felt wrong to me. How can one truly understand the characters' struggles and choices if one views their lives through a 21st-century U.S. lens? The difference, when my content area changed officially to humanities, was that I could dive deep into this context versus rushing to get as much in at the start before feeling like I was shirking my job in teaching English.
One of my first tasks as a new humanities teacher, then, was finding YA books that matched the humanities units I was teaching. This is where the wheels started to come off. I'd often heard complaints of how hard it is to find YA books--especially good YA books--about non-Western cultures and especially by authors who are from those cultures themselves. I don't want to say I was dismissive of this complaint, but I sure didn't pay it much mind until I discovered firsthand just how true it was. Given the shelves and shelves of YA books and the recent renaissance in viewing YA as a serious, worthy genre unto itself, I was disappointed in how few books I could find that weren't laser-focused on the 21st-century problems of U.S. teens. And of the ones I did find, how few provided me with enough meaningful content that I could justify using the book to teach my Reading Literature standards.
I am still struggling through this--two years in--and it is still a source of frustration, but it did have the advantage of expanding my own reading. I am very much of the model-what-I-teach camp; I share my scholarly and creative work with my students to show, I hope, that learning is not an endpoint but a journey and that the skills I am teaching them do have relevance in the world beyond school. The same with reading. If I'm going to ask them to challenge themselves, I should be modeling that in my own reading too. Anyway, I initially thought of keeping my project private because I'm aware that white women from the U.S. doing these kinds of reading lists feels self-congratulatory, but I really do want your recommendations and also for people to read some of the wonderful books I've discovered through my own reading. At this point, my strategy has been to literally start on the A-shelf at the library and work my way alphabetically and read everything I run into in that section of the alphabet that sounds interesting.
I think I have finally put my finger firmly on why I often don't like the literary fiction genre--and yes, I use that term very deliberately. I don't generally encounter these kinds of stories because I steer clear of the university-professor-having-an-affair-type books in my own reading. I remember Neighbor Bob lending me a stack of books by his college girlfriend to see what I thought of them, and I only got through one before returning the stack as not quite my thing. (They weren't quite his thing either, so no harm, no foul.) What I remember of that book was the relentless navel-gazing by a character where such squishy introspection felt unrealistic. This is why, I thought, the "literary genre" is just as unrealistic as fantasy or sci-fi or mystery or name-your-genre with their supposed "formulas" and "tropes." Literary stories have no shortage of these either and they also, like any genre, play to a limited audience.
One of the books I encountered in my alphabetical march along the Fiction shelves at the Goodrich Memorial Library was The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu. The blurb on the inside cover sounded exactly perfect: It followed the lives of three young women during their mandatory service in the Israeli military. The reviews on the back promised that it was well-written, and the author was Israeli and had undergone the same mandatory military service. It seemed to check all of my boxes for a book worth trying out.
It was the most disappointed I've been in a book in the while. There were parts that were good, where I was excited to pick up the book and read more--mostly surrounding their actual military service--but it was also over-the-top literary, where the characters did things not because that was in any way how an actual human would behave in such a situation but because the action was clearly intended to be symbolic of something deeper. For example, there is a part where two of the characters come home from the military and discover that, in an olive grove beside one of their houses, one of the trees has died. Olive trees are supposed to be exceptionally long-lived and indestructible. The symbolism here isn't a stretch and is reasonable. I feel a deep sadness at the deaths of trees. If ever there was a tangible reminder of the mortality of everything, it is seeing death's hand close on the grandeur of something there when you were born and, to our mayfly-short lives, a seemingly indestructible part of the landscape. But the women conclude that the neighbor on the other side of the grove has killed the tree by pouring gasoline on its roots during a party. So they break into his house and pour gasoline on his feet.
Absolutely no one would do this. It rings more false to me than fire-breathing dragons and shape-shifting aliens and detectives that can tell from a set of footprints in the snow what the suspect had to eat last night. What I love about fiction is the ability to imaginatively occupy bodies, places, and experiences I will never have. Essential to that is that connection to believable human experiences, which is why I don't personally give a fig about genre. I adore fantasy and sci-fi and horror, and I like the occasional mystery, Western, and romance too. There are bad books in those genres but, oh man, there are some phenomenal books too; books that hit every note just right in giving me the chance to exist otherwise than myself for a few hours. Robin Hobb, with her dragons and liveships and magical portals, feels more connected to reality than The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.
Different strokes for different folks. People who like novels like that--power to you. But when I read books like that, I can't help but chuckle at the snooty affectations of those who believe in a dichotomy of "literary" and "genre," where I read stuff like that and push it under the heading of "literary genre."
And now, I'm off to write the next chapter of my Silmarillion/Home Alone crossover, the exact opposite of any kind of literary pretension.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/437028.html
First of all, I'm doing a Read Around the World challenge. I started it p-locked (and my list is still in-progress because I'm also trying to read a book set in each of the 50 U.S. states and have more to add than what I've listed so far) but am opening it up because 1) I'd love recommendations on what to read and 2) thought it might be useful for others who want to expand their reading horizons.
There's a lot of YA on the list, which is more an occupational hazard than a personal preference. Yes, there are many excellent YA books out there, but you won't hear me follow up with "just as good as books written for adults!" I still prefer immensely, as a general rule, books written for an adult audience.
When my position changed from "English language arts" to "humanities," I was left to determine how best to integrate the two content areas I'd be teaching, and the approach I ended up going with was to use literature from the culture, region, or time period we were learning about in the "social studies" half of my content area to hit my Reading Literature standards. I'd already been doing this as much as I could, even as an English teacher; the idea of reading a work of literature without cultural or historical context has always felt wrong to me. How can one truly understand the characters' struggles and choices if one views their lives through a 21st-century U.S. lens? The difference, when my content area changed officially to humanities, was that I could dive deep into this context versus rushing to get as much in at the start before feeling like I was shirking my job in teaching English.
One of my first tasks as a new humanities teacher, then, was finding YA books that matched the humanities units I was teaching. This is where the wheels started to come off. I'd often heard complaints of how hard it is to find YA books--especially good YA books--about non-Western cultures and especially by authors who are from those cultures themselves. I don't want to say I was dismissive of this complaint, but I sure didn't pay it much mind until I discovered firsthand just how true it was. Given the shelves and shelves of YA books and the recent renaissance in viewing YA as a serious, worthy genre unto itself, I was disappointed in how few books I could find that weren't laser-focused on the 21st-century problems of U.S. teens. And of the ones I did find, how few provided me with enough meaningful content that I could justify using the book to teach my Reading Literature standards.
I am still struggling through this--two years in--and it is still a source of frustration, but it did have the advantage of expanding my own reading. I am very much of the model-what-I-teach camp; I share my scholarly and creative work with my students to show, I hope, that learning is not an endpoint but a journey and that the skills I am teaching them do have relevance in the world beyond school. The same with reading. If I'm going to ask them to challenge themselves, I should be modeling that in my own reading too. Anyway, I initially thought of keeping my project private because I'm aware that white women from the U.S. doing these kinds of reading lists feels self-congratulatory, but I really do want your recommendations and also for people to read some of the wonderful books I've discovered through my own reading. At this point, my strategy has been to literally start on the A-shelf at the library and work my way alphabetically and read everything I run into in that section of the alphabet that sounds interesting.
I think I have finally put my finger firmly on why I often don't like the literary fiction genre--and yes, I use that term very deliberately. I don't generally encounter these kinds of stories because I steer clear of the university-professor-having-an-affair-type books in my own reading. I remember Neighbor Bob lending me a stack of books by his college girlfriend to see what I thought of them, and I only got through one before returning the stack as not quite my thing. (They weren't quite his thing either, so no harm, no foul.) What I remember of that book was the relentless navel-gazing by a character where such squishy introspection felt unrealistic. This is why, I thought, the "literary genre" is just as unrealistic as fantasy or sci-fi or mystery or name-your-genre with their supposed "formulas" and "tropes." Literary stories have no shortage of these either and they also, like any genre, play to a limited audience.
One of the books I encountered in my alphabetical march along the Fiction shelves at the Goodrich Memorial Library was The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu. The blurb on the inside cover sounded exactly perfect: It followed the lives of three young women during their mandatory service in the Israeli military. The reviews on the back promised that it was well-written, and the author was Israeli and had undergone the same mandatory military service. It seemed to check all of my boxes for a book worth trying out.
It was the most disappointed I've been in a book in the while. There were parts that were good, where I was excited to pick up the book and read more--mostly surrounding their actual military service--but it was also over-the-top literary, where the characters did things not because that was in any way how an actual human would behave in such a situation but because the action was clearly intended to be symbolic of something deeper. For example, there is a part where two of the characters come home from the military and discover that, in an olive grove beside one of their houses, one of the trees has died. Olive trees are supposed to be exceptionally long-lived and indestructible. The symbolism here isn't a stretch and is reasonable. I feel a deep sadness at the deaths of trees. If ever there was a tangible reminder of the mortality of everything, it is seeing death's hand close on the grandeur of something there when you were born and, to our mayfly-short lives, a seemingly indestructible part of the landscape. But the women conclude that the neighbor on the other side of the grove has killed the tree by pouring gasoline on its roots during a party. So they break into his house and pour gasoline on his feet.
Absolutely no one would do this. It rings more false to me than fire-breathing dragons and shape-shifting aliens and detectives that can tell from a set of footprints in the snow what the suspect had to eat last night. What I love about fiction is the ability to imaginatively occupy bodies, places, and experiences I will never have. Essential to that is that connection to believable human experiences, which is why I don't personally give a fig about genre. I adore fantasy and sci-fi and horror, and I like the occasional mystery, Western, and romance too. There are bad books in those genres but, oh man, there are some phenomenal books too; books that hit every note just right in giving me the chance to exist otherwise than myself for a few hours. Robin Hobb, with her dragons and liveships and magical portals, feels more connected to reality than The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.
Different strokes for different folks. People who like novels like that--power to you. But when I read books like that, I can't help but chuckle at the snooty affectations of those who believe in a dichotomy of "literary" and "genre," where I read stuff like that and push it under the heading of "literary genre."
And now, I'm off to write the next chapter of my Silmarillion/Home Alone crossover, the exact opposite of any kind of literary pretension.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/437028.html