On a shelf in my mother’s personal library are a few Danielle Steele novels. Peppered among them are some presidential autobiographies (Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s, specifically) some evangelical hardcovers, Roots, and at least one John Grisham novel. There’s a bunch more, but those are what I remember following us from house to house. Which means there is a non-zero possibility that the earliest-published of some of these books were the first I encountered. Not necessarily encountered as in “read,” but encountered as in “saw as an object to be engaged with.” The way I might, later on, look at a Nintendo 64 or a two-VHS set of Quo Vadis. I don’t think I started out as a particularly voracious reader. There was Frog and Toad and something I vaguely remember as Shark Tales as well as other miscellanea (a flirtation with Goosebumps and Animorphs), but one early work I distinctly remember getting lost in or having an appetite for, is an X-Men novelization titled The Jewels of Cyttorak. I don’t need to go into too much detail about why it makes all the sense in the world for someone who religiously got up early on Saturday mornings for X-Men:TAS to pick up and subsequently devour a book with his favorite mutants on the cover. But I did (devour the book) and it does (make sense).
Another thing happening in tandem occurred during childhood summers spent at the local YMCA where we would basically live while Mom was at work. In my memory, the public library was very close by. The way Mnemosyne’s spyglass distorts time and space has me placing that library practically across the street from the YMCA when I know it couldn’t have possibly been that close. Still, it was where we were ordered to go after the day-camp stuff let out and Mom was still at work. A lot of the time was spent at computer terminals trying to find Carmen Sandiego, but some of it was spent wandering the aisles looking for things with cool-looking covers. Which brought me to R.A. Salvatore and David Eddings and eventually Robert Jordan, fanning the flames that had already been ignited into a coruscating blaze whenever I sat down to watch anime. All that imagination, physics be damned. A sidenote to this is that Mom also commanded me to pick up political biographies to read, probably because increasing my verbiage and reading comprehension would help me find those missing two points on whatever test or quiz I brought home with a 98 on it. Which is how I somehow wound up with a book on Cicero in my hands. So I want to dash away any illusions that I was some self-initiated Dougie Houser-type reading prodigy or whatever. I read a book on Cicero because my mom told me to. And because it had a cool cover.
What’s brought me down memory lane is this recent article in The Atlantic lamenting the (precipitous, some would say) decline in readership among American kids. I’m not an educator or librarian or parent, but, disclaimer out the way, it seemed like the author said a lot of smart things on the topic, certainly quite a few things I agree with and believe. But perhaps it’s for reasons of word count that the piece left me wanting.1 It wasn’t exactly a “oh, this doesn’t speak to my experience so of course it’s not completely correct” type beat.2 It was kind of a “hmm, I wonder what other ingredients there are in this burger.” Type beat.
If there was a dumb-ening taking place even during the time my reading started to take off, how did I escape?
One of the things the article points at is the idea that kids are no longer encouraged to look for or find the fun in a literary object or that fun can’t even be a vector along which an educational outcome is reached. I think that touches on an essential piece of the puzzle, but I also think the framing might be a bit limiting. I don’t think I read a book I properly enjoyed for school until Grendel by John Gardner my senior spring of high school, and only then because 1) the high school I went to was the type that gave seminar teachers wider latitude to roam about their specializations and 2) for that class we had a particularly maverick educator.3 At the risk of digressing into my increasingly convoluted thinking on literary representation, what put me off the most was my Junior Year American Lit class. For context, the summer before our very first term of high school, we had to read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.4 So it was assumed that we’d been primed for Their Eyes Were Watching God and Native Son and other books that spoke similarly to the Black American experience. To my junior year English teacher’s credit, it wasn’t just an education in literary/grammatical technique; we got into depiction of social issues, the implication of Hurston’s dialogue choices, all of that. But if that selection had been the entirety of my reading life at that time, I mighta looked at books the way I looked at my first dragon in that inaugural playthrough of Elden Ring. Thank God for Alexandre Dumas and John Le Carré, my dual twinblades.
I mention those two writers specifically because they were talismans that found their way onto my person some time during middle school.5 And because it brings me back to the “fun” of it all. It makes more sense for an adolescent to fall for The Three Musketeers or The Man in the Iron Mask than it does for a teenager to come to the absolute and immovable conclusion that A Perfect Spy is the greatest postwar novel of the 20th century. But what struck me about those two authors and many others both adjacent and far afield of them was that exciting shit was happening in their books.
The truth is this: Spies and assassins are fucking cool.
And if those spies and the articulation of their inner lives happens to be my window into the emotional/psychological/spiritual contours of the human condition, icing on the motherlovin’ cake.
No teacher in my entire educational life (and it’s been a long frickin’ educational life) ever included a John Le Carré novel on a syllabus. And I don’t know who, between my Poli Sci profs or my English profs, would be less inclined to do so.
The point I want to make is that sometimes I see the word “fun” and I think the person using it means “funny” like Curious George or the Boxcar Children or (among the more open-minded of our educational gatekeepers) a graphic novel. "Fun" can also mean buried treasure and discourses on the cyclical nature of vengeance and motherfuckers trying to climb the Berlin Wall and getting shot for it. "Fun" not just like "ha-ha" fun but also "holy shit that's cool" fun. In so many conversations I am a part of or unwittingly overhear, there is so much emphasis on the heart and on the (oh, God) "empathic power of literature" like it's going to end Racism™ or something6 and I don't hear nearly enough about the desire to break a kid's freaking brain. Bro. In high school, when I saw a g-d city fall out of the sky?! If that X-Men book taught me hunger, reading Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, hunched over a table in the public library of where I went to high school, damn near demanding they order me the next volume because it wasn’t already on the shelf, was where I met addiction.7
Maybe this is an entreaty to sneak more specfic onto syllabi, but I think the Thing of it all is even bigger than that.
Something else that happened the same day I read that Atlantic piece was that, for literal shits ‘n giggles, I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of bestselling novels in the US from the 1900s to 2022, the last year for which there’s a full listing. It’s a poor way of tracking changing tastes and trends in American readership and of course such tastes and trends are informed by a panoply of things it would take people who make their living in intersecting disciplines forever to identify and articulate, but it was interesting (and, dare I say, “fun”8) to watch a list built along relatively consistent parameters go from featuring Sophie’s Choice and Rebecca and Advise and Consent to a list containing, at one point, two installments of the Left Behind series. One bit of not-even-amateur pseudo-scientific inquiry had me cross-checking appearances on those lists with nominations and wins re some of the big USian literary prizes. For Whom the Bell Tolls, famously snubbed for a Pulitzer, took up residence on the list in 1940 and 1941; there’s some James A. Michener in there; you’ll catch some Saul Bellow in the 1960s; William Styron’s Pulitzer-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner was No. 2 in ‘67; Gore Vidal pops up a bit; at the turn of the 20th century, Booth Tarkington and Upton Sinclair were on some serious chart-topping rap superstar shit. But one thing that prompted this was the ever-recurring anxiety that America’s dumbed down or that celebrated works aren’t popular.9 Because more people watch movies than read books, the filmic version of this back-and-forth is so much louder. “Ahhhhh, all the Marvel movies are taking over my screens; nobody’s playing the new austere Michael Haneke film! Damn those Marvel fans for making the Disney behemoth so much money!” That sort of thing.10 As though folks who enjoy Captain America: The Winter Soldier and folks who think Caché is the most stunning and well-executed indictment of cultural and political amnesia in French society couldn’t possibly overlap.11
It brings to mind the image of the white guy at the chicken farm who gets called into his office by his boss one day, gets fired, and learns later that he’s been replaced by a Mexican laborer; then he proceeds to get vindictive and vitriolic toward the Mexican rather than the white boss who fired him. Cinephiles who cast aspersions on Marvel fans and action-movie acolytes who sneer at Martin Scorsese devotees are the fired white guy and the fired white guy again, because maybe the fan isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s the corporation embedded in the shareholder-run society whose only mandate is making more money faster than it did in the last three-month period.
Bringing this back to books, y’all need to leave Colleen Hoover alone! No, but seriously, the shrill-ass question I think folks might need to be screaming themselves hoarse is not “how come melodramatic teen romance sagas depicting ummmm? power dynamics between male and female characters have supplanted Southern Gothic treatises on America’s failure to reckon with its Original Sin written in simultaneously languorous, elliptical and abstruse sentences” and perhaps rather “how come the imperative to publish and market the hell out of the Southern Gothic et cetera treatise-novel doesn’t seem to be a priority in X publishing house/imprint”. Why get mad at the laborer who’s really good at their job when the boss is the one that fired you or, even worse, refused to hire you in the first place?12
I often hear people lament that nobody these days is out there writing the next Lolita or Sabbath’s Theater or American Psycho or The Bluest Eye or Ulysses, but the real tea is that nobody’s publishing them these days. And sometimes the lamentation’s object is the idea of controversial subject matter but more often the lamentation’s object is stylistic verve or whatever. Where did deft POV-hopping go? Whither the two-page sentence? Somebody put out an APB for the 1000-page book about a guy on Death Row! How come almost everything out of a Big Five Publisher is 400 pages or less? Why do the Poles get The Books of Jacob? For so many of the wailing, clothes-rending bereaved, the next Thomas Pynchon shares stature with the Twelfth Imam. I’m in the middle of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, and I don’t know that I’m wrong in assuming the main reason we have an English translation of that book is because it had already won the Prix Goncourt.
It’s the same tune as the funeral dirge for 1970s cinema whenever a new franchise installment gets announced. Could Dog Day Afternoon or The Deer Hunter or Network get made today? Even beyond an Attica-era United States, dudes be like <puffs self-rolled cigarette> “we live in a society where nobody watches Breathless anymore” <exhale> when perhaps the issue is what studio would look at a script for a movie like Breathless in the Year of our Lord 2023 and say “let’s f’ing go” and on top of that give it a marketing budget that ensures it exists in the cultural psyche beyond “For Your Consideration” season? Go on, I’ll wait.13
All of which is to say: Don’t hate the player, hate the Dungeon Master.
It goes without saying that I have skin in this game. Especially because I’m writing a book right now that may very well be unpublishable, not because it isn’t good (it is, trust me), but because it’s inspired by and draws heavily from literary techniques that were poppin’ in 19th century France and Russia. Not so much now.
The enemy isn’t the franchise fan. The enemy isn’t the reader. The enemy is the bottom line.
I take a sort of morbid consolation in the fact of my present work, because I know that unpublishable doesn’t have to mean unreadable.14 I know this because the work-in-progress is fun. Yeah, there's maybe some ha-ha fun. But the plan, at the end of the day, is to do for others what previous authors have so generously done for me. Which is to leave more than a few broken brains in my wake.
I don’t want this to sound like scolding at all. I won’t even say that the grown-ups doth worry too much. It’s all valid to me and everything, but I think the question “are the kids reading” is missing a word, right at the front. An interrogative, in fact.
I think the question, more hopeful, more trusting of the generations that came and are coming after ours, is “what are the kids reading”. Because if they’re not cutting their teeth on War and Peace, I can guarantee you that they’re hunched over a table somewhere, maybe in a library, inhaling One Piece.
Word on the street is it’s pretty good.
Currently reading: The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
Currently listening: Yen - Slipknot
I don’t actually think offering the reader a comprehensive explanation for the loss of love of reading among young Americans was the author’s intention.
I’d be a damn liar if I said that wasn’t a part of it.
She let us choose (in very democratic fashion) one of the books we would read that trimester, and we settled on The Kite Runner, which was such a thrilling experience for me at that age.
How the fuck was I supposed to get that book or what was going on in it at, like, 13?
There’s a very convoluted story about why I was reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold at 12 that I really don’t have space for here. It involves a Writer’s Market book series, snake-oil salesmen and, oddly enough, Mario Puzo.
A caveat: sure James Baldwin dropped the banger that was Another Country and we still got ghettos and racially-motivated extrajudicial murders of Black Americans, but I don’t think we get President Barack Obama absent the work Toni Morrison did in expanding the American imagination and, thus, the way Americans picture and mythologize themselves.
Nevermind that Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is the defining work of my literary education and a superlative achievement in storytelling, as well as one of the most courageous and poignant statements on youth alienation and nuclear armament ever to have been made. Also, if you tried to guess how much Kodansha has grossed on the Attack on Titan manga alone, your first 2 (maybe 3) answers would be too low.
“ha-ha” fun
And less that popular works aren’t celebrated. Caveat: the Academy did expand their Best Picture nom slots to 10, but :: shrug emoji ::
Disclaimer: I get checks from the Mouse.
It me. I am the overlap. Like, my man, some of us shed Denzel-tears at the end of the first Black Panther and have binged all of Kinji Fukasaku's five-part Battles Without Honor and Humanity. We contain multitudes.
Sit down, A24. I said sit down!
Goes without saying that it sometimes does.
Why you bein' weird to ME
I don't know if you've ever written or discussed this: but I'd love to hear more about your take on Robert Jordan. I've seen your writing on how he opened your eyes to the idea of it being a job, a craft.
But he's a fraught subject for writers, with a very compelling and interesting world on one hand, and a lot of... frankly extraneous writing, an inability to actually come towards dramatic conclusions, etc, on the other.
I've grappled with this myself, being fascinated by the story but ground down by the prose.
I've fallen in love with your work, consuming Riot Baby almost in one sitting. You have such clear command of your prose, and none of the bloat I've seen in Jordan. Have you grappled similarly with the sheer-word scale of Wheel of Time?
Do you have a different perspective on approaching those books and that style? Maybe I'm just not meeting the books where they're at...