Last Sunday I wrote about some ideas on diversity, and this week I thought I’d take a somewhat different tack. Over the past week I wrote about three books that could be taken as rather male-oriented, although I would say that The Lives of Rocks is actually one of the more female-oriented books I’ve read this year. And lately I’ve been reading more contemporary fiction than I often do.

So I thought I would pick the brains of my readers, who probably have a pretty good idea at this point of my tastes. I’d like to find a contemporary book written by a female author that addresses the sorts of themes I seem to be interested in. Emily said in the comments last week that she “stubbornly refuse[s] to believe that work by male authors holds inherently greater appeal to [her] than work by female authors.” I too refuse to believe this, but I do have a hard time finding female authors doing a certain kind of work I’m interested in (and right now, I’m most interested in this): I want the female version of American Masculine, a work about isolation and the difficulty of interpersonal relationships, but not a work about “family,” where “family” means “children” or “parents.” Who is the female Conrad, the female Melville, the female Shann Ray? I’ve certainly liked works by women this year, from the contemporary Alissa Nutting and Karen Russell to old friends like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Muriel Spark, but these just aren’t quite the same. What have you got for me?

On Friday, The Reading Ape asked for his Friday Forum question whether there is an ethics of reading, referring first to a post on reading guilt and then to one on reading and diversity.

I had read an earlier Amy Reads post on diversity in the context of BEA with some interest. Thinking at first that the post would be about diversity of books—genre, style, form, large and small publishing houses, the marketable and the less so—I was excited. But I quickly realized the focus was on, as it seems to be for many bloggers, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of authors (and attendees).

Like Amy, “I think it is important to read diversely,” but I’m not referring to identity politics when I say that. I recoil from the concept, as I do from all identity politics, which imply a collectivism that I find oppressive and disturbing. An identity politics of class would make more sense to me, is what I sometimes lapse into in my own life in general—but I still consider it a lapse. A later post from Amy discusses writing about the “other,” but everyone else is the “other.” As she questions whether a white American woman can write a “true” book (for some unclear definition of “true”) about Rwanda, I can only question whether any Rwandan could have written a book that would be “true” for anyone else but himself anyway—are not his own compatriots “others,” with an inner life utterly inaccessible to anyone, regardless of race, religion, or nationality (except through an ineffable interpersonal transcendence)? I recently read the first chapter of a novel set just a few miles away from where I grew up, and almost every description rang false to me. My immediate thought was that the author—a white woman about my age—had never really been to southwestern Connecticut, and certainly had not grown up there. But she had, again, just miles away from me, at the very same time. I couldn’t possibly finish a book like this myself, so perhaps the Rwandans who read the other book will be too close to the situation and have to abandon it as well. But does that mean the Connecticut novel isn’t going to be “true” for any number of other people, who may find an effective work of art where I found only wrongness?

Amy’s latest post on the subject (the first of hers linked above) closes with this food for thought:

I do think, as Teresa said, that we all have to think about what our passions truly are and what we find important. We have to realize that these books are often white, heterosexual, cisgender, and North American or European. If you only request those books, what message is that sending to the publishers about what sells?

The message I want to send to publishers (from whom, at this point, I request nothing but purchase much) is that I’m interested in good books, interesting books, attractive books, and if possible, books that are all three. That is what my passion is and what I truly find important. Any reading guilt I have comes from reading things that I enjoy but don’t live up to this—and it’s only guilt in the mildest sense of the term. I feel guilty about reading the latest Thursday Next novel not because Jasper Fforde is a white male, but because I know it’s not a very interesting book. Of course, I don’t feel that guilty, because it’s excellent entertainment and I want publishers to publish the kind of trash I like as well as the kind of real books I like.

It’s not directly in any of The Reading Ape’s questions, but there is an undercurrent throughout most of this, and especially in Rachel’s post on reading guilt, about promoting books via blogging, and the responsbility of being someone who has an influence, maybe, on the reading of others. I don’t think much of this blog as “making a difference in the world,” but I do know this: according to Fyrefly’s wonderful book blog search engine and a somewhat superficial Google Blogs search, I appear to be the only blogger to have written anything about Almayer’s Folly or Lucy Church Amiably and one of the few to have done so about The Death of Virgil, Clarel or Mardi, and that’s based just on searching a handful of titles. The world is not lacking for good books that not enough people read, or read about on blogs. Should this not count as “discover[ing] and promot[ing] books that may not get as big of a voice as others” just because all of the above authors are white, and all but one or two are heterosexual? Among this group we have an epic poem in bizarro meter; impenetrable high modernism; a prose-poem-symphony; an early, little-read novel by a master of English literature; and whatever the hell Mardi is. And that strikes me as more meaningfully diverse than, say, reading half a dozen conventional narratives by authors with half a dozen different skin tones. (Of course, in other senses my reading is very homogeneous; there are many, many genres I do not read at all for example.) If publishers get this message from me I will be pleased, I suppose, but I don’t think they will be coming out with the next Clarel anytime soon. At least not most of them.

It would be wrong to imply I don’t understand the motivations behind a lot of this, and in fact, it exposes what I consider to be the real failings and weaknesses of my blogging. Aside from the perpetual attempts to combat “privilege,” the kinds of people who read a bunch and like to blog about it are curious by nature and love to learn. I’m like this too, and I absolutely do enjoy learning about different places, times, and cultures in my reading. I love trivia, I love good aphorisms, and yes, I enjoy reveling in the ideas of authors I find smart and thoughtful. But that’s not really what I want to talk about—I want to talk about how they do it, how fiction works, as it were. This is what I wish I did better.

My readers know that I like to do themed reads and projects, as well, and it might seem like I want to do a Latin American project to understand Latin America, or a Russian project to understand Russia, or what have you. But this would be a mistake: these projects are much more about literary traditions and movements than some kind of cultural diversity requirement. I want to know what people in different places, times, and cultures have decided to attempt to do with literature, and how well they have succeeded, what they have worked novels out to be. Yes, this is also all bound up in what kinds of ideas they are trying to express in literature, what they are depicting, but that’s only a part of the whole, and for me not often the most interesting part.

This is also why I like to do things as projects. I have only the most moderate understanding of English or American literature, and even less for French, German, Italian, Russian, or Japanese. I still feel like I barely have the background to wrap my arms around novels written by people almost like myself, at least as far as all these identities go. If you want to understand a literary tradition, it’s a lot of work. In the past 18 months or so, I have read six volumes of Latin American fiction, which is nothing, just nothing at all, not enough to feel nearly like I know what is going on in all of it. Do bloggers who make a point of “reading diversely” conquer this problem? I’m sure if you decided to read one book a month by a GLBTQ author you would get somewhere in the realm of GLBTQ literature before long. But something about the argument for diversity, maybe because it’s an argument for diversity rather than an argument against monoculture, makes it seem more about superficial, broad-but-shallow reading, a list of pigeonholes to fill. And it so often seems to me that since we can fill those pigeonholes with books that are so alike in all other ways, we are not really getting anywhere. If you’ve decided you want to read a bunch of GLBTQ books because you want to understand how GLBTQ fiction works, because you’re interested in knowing, do it, and write about it and tell me. Explore something, analyze it, figure it out, see how it relates to other traditions, how it innovates. Everyone reads for their own reasons, as they should, but those are the ones that matter to me.

I don’t normally spend a lot of energy getting worked up about forthcoming releases (or things at The Millions), but this list of titles expected out over the next year is pretty juicy. So let’s make this short work week and even shorter blog week full of lists—these are the ones I am excited about/might read/will probably not read but will spend the next five years thinking about as “that book I almost read when it came out”:

• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. As a nonreader of Tree of Smoke, I feel like I shouldn’t be interested in this, but the novella aspect and comments from Jennifer Egan and David Guterson make it sound yummy.
• I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck. Is the title not enough? This is definitely on the Probably Won’t Actually Read side, but I feel like I wouldn’t regret it if I did.
• There But For The by Ali Smith. I didn’t love the one novel of hers I read, and I don’t love the premise of this one so much (a dinner party guest locks himself in a room and “communicates only via notes passed out under the door”), but I’m due for another try with Smith. (That sounds negative. I have really liked her short stories and her contribution to the Canongate Myths series, Girl Meets Boy.)
• King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher. I don’t know, I read The Northern Clemency and it was pretty good, if brutal. It wasn’t really super-my-style, but I feel like Hensher is worth watching.
• Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge. I liked The Facts of Winter, but have never been motivated to read his other two novels…and the whole online aspect of this sounds maybe horribly gimmicky. But I’m at least interested in a place “so isolated…that it has its own language.”
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. No comment necessary. Oh wait, yes there is: I HAVE BEEN WAITING YEARS FOR THIS.
• Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet. I developed quite a thing for Millet last year (can’t believe it was so long ago), though I purposely avoided reading the book that is the first in the planned trilogy in which this is the second volume. So probably I shouldn’t read it until I’ve given that a shot first. Or maybe ever. Not sure if “Millet’s preoccupation with [the] ‘relationship of the individual self to society and the social self, and morality’” is something I want to read about, or really don’t want to read about (cf. that one story about the mom and Noam Chomsky, ugh).
• The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. I know nothing about this guy, and the fact that he was interviewed by HTMLGIANT may be a bad sign for me, but this description pretty much wins me over: “Marcus said the book is about ‘a husband and wife who are sickened by the speech of their daughter. Literally. So sickened that they have to leave her.’”
• Hot Pink by Adam Levin. Heard good things about The Instructions, and he’s a Chicago author, but I’m just not ready for the commitment. Short stories, much more so.
• The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, especially of this type, but I am pretty interested in the topic.

Hmm, another list of 10. I’m certain to read the Murakami, but how many others. Maybe one? Two?

I was so busy planning and thinking about the likes of this that it completely slipped my mind that the start of July meant the start of the second half of the year. I hope my readers won’t be too disappointed, but I’ve decided to save the charts this time for the end of the year only. Instead, I wanted to come up with a list of the best books I’ve read so far this year—a concept I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few weeks.

Inspired in part by Eva’s work on her personal athenaeum and the idea of a personal canon, I’ve been thinking about taking a stab at pulling together something like that for myself. For now, here are the “best” books I’ve read this year, according to such criteria as how much I liked them and…how “good” I thought they were. Now that’s helpful! In the order I read them in:

• Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (re-read)
• The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (re-read)
• The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• Almayer’s Folly by Joseph Conrad
• An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad
• Ubu Enchained by Alfred Jarry
• Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías

This list is insane! Do I really think short stories by Maile Meloy, as good as they are, are better than Mary or King, Queen, Knave? Of course not—Nabokov beats almost anything, anytime. And 40% of the top ten is Conrad—now, that’s actually probably about right, but still insane. And who will be surprised to note that, even in a year where I break records (for me) in reading women, only one makes my top ten? Sigh. Laura Ingalls Wilder would be on here if I could count her whole series together, I suppose. It seems hard to pick out just one book, since I think it’s so much better as a coherent whole.

What would have been added if I had limited the list to newly read books, counting out Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier (since I only re-read them because they were among my favorites, it’s kind of cheating)? Probably American Masculine, the collection of short stories I just finished by Shann Ray, and The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville. Again, of course, neither better than Nabokov. I hate that I’m handicapping things to have some contemporary stuff, some short stories.

And one of these (along with several other contenders) I haven’t even written about yet. The Ebb-Tide, shoot, I’m going to have to re-read it to blog it. Not that that’s a great loss. Stevenson, why did I put you down after a brief but productive fling this spring?

And if I had limited it to just one book per author, so Conrad had to give up some of his spots? Well, Lord Jim would be the remaining one for him, and the extra three places would probably go to the ones I already mentioned, and maybe The Comforters (another woman!), or The Man Who Would Be King, or…this is far too hard.

So now for my question: does anyone know of a good “solution,” preferably web-based, for creating lists that I would like to change over time by knocking off an item every time a new one is added? I think that’s how I’d like to work out this personal canon of mine, by building up 100 or so titles and then each time I think of a new one that deserves to be on the list, forcing myself to cross something else off. Of course, I could do this with any spreadsheet or word processing program, but you know that’s just not as fun as a bona fide list-making tool. If anyone has any elegant ideas, I would love to hear them. (Bonus points if it can actually keep track of how things change!)

I’m on a(n apparently) very slow journey toward thinking and writing more about what I’m doing, always trying not to go too far down the road of boring meta-blogging, and today I’ve got another anti-reviewing piece that I’ve decided to take a swing at. This time it’s an essay from n+1 by Elizabeth Gumport, “Against Reviews.” I’m still not sure what it’s about, other than being against reviews.

Gumport begins by describing the good old days, when writers were supported by patrons and only a very few books exists. As literacy and mass production of books increased, reviews became important in finding what to read next. “This unprecedented outpouring of reviews meant that for the first time an author’s fortune was determined by the general public rather than by a private patron,” Gumport says, but the reviews themselves are a red herring here. It’s the mass production and rising literacy, not to mention of the rise of the bourgeoisie in general and their spending power, that took the control out of the hands of patrons and put it into popular support. Reviews may have been part of that ecosystem, but the reviews themselves hardly put control into the hands of the masses.

Next, Gumport seems to lament this switch away from patronage. Now, a writer would think, “Her readers were too many, and they were strangers to her. How could she seduce them, and why?” What does this say about why artists created art during the time of patronage? Is this about creating art at all, or about seducing people? Do writers have motivations I’m really not aware of?

Then:

As printing presses and distribution channels became more efficient, the number of reviews increased, muddying their original purpose. “Now that [the author] has sixty reviews where in the nineteenth century he had perhaps six,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “he finds that there is no such thing as ‘an opinion’ of his work. Praise cancels blame; and blame praise. Soon he comes to discount both praise and blame; they are equally worthless. He values the review only for its effect upon his reputation and for its effect upon his sales.”

If the “original purpose” that is being “mudd[ied]” is telling the public about a book so they could decide whether they wanted to buy it, that purpose is not muddied at all. It’s exactly what people do with competing reviews. The Woolf quote is off point entirely, unless we’re talking about the original purpose of reviews from the author‘s point of view. In fact, the Woolf quote gives away the game—these discordant reviews are now only valuable for their effect on sales. And if, by contrast, the original purpose was all along supposed to be serving the author, then I have little problem with it being muddied.

This kind of confused thinking is pervasive. “If book reviews are nothing but free advertising,” Gumport writes, “they are among the most ineffectual, ill-conceived marketing campaigns ever conceived.” Well, aside from not knowing the difference between advertising and marketing…

It’s strange to think that an account of what’s inside a book would be a good way to sell it. Imagine if McDonald’s commercials told you what went into a Big Mac: rehydrated onions, high-fructose corn syrup, ammonia-treated beef.

This is almost getting interesting. What is inside a book? Do book reviews tell you what “go into” a book? Do they tell you how all the pieces of plot and character development and structure fit together invisibly to give you a certain feeling when you read it? Do they lay bare the gears and cogs and the man behind the curtain, making the novel work as a piece of art? Not really, not in my experience at least. They tell you how it tastes—something Gumport actually complains about elsewhere!

This is really only a taste of the essay; I truly don’t even know where it’s trying to go sometimes. I guess, though it doesn’t quite end here, the goal is this:

Imagine a literary culture in which the relationship between reader and writer was as intimate and direct as the relationship between poet and patron. This would not be, and never was, a recipe for health or contentment—most marriages are unhappy. But the “passion” that Arnold thought needed to be neutralized could proudly speak its name. Why should a writer be ashamed to write for someone she knows? Why should her friends and enemies feign a lack of interest in her work? Affection, attraction, admiration, rivalry, resentment: all are aphrodisiacs, and heighten our interest in what’s before us. Nobody insists we fuck strangers—why must we read them? If the privacy of pure patronage is impossible or undesirable, the traditional courtship can be replaced by the orgy.

It surprises me that we think friends and enemies feign lack of interest in our work; I certainly don’t imagine they feign anything but the slightest interest therein. I’m not ashamed to write for people I know; I simply recognize that the vast majority of them don’t want to read what I write—but there are other people, somewhere out there, who do, and who will find me on the internet amid a huge marketplace of blogs. If a writer wants to write for someone she knows, so she can write intimately and meaningfully for that person, I have nothing at all bad to say about that. But what on earth does it have to do with me, or with reviews?

There are, I imagine, lots of valuable things to say about reviews, criticism, what we should spend our limited time reading, and all that. Hopefully someday I will be able to write some of it. Until then I’ll try to be optimistic about other people’s ideas.

Update: Giveaway now closed, sorry to any latecomers!

On Monday I mentioned that I would be participating, at some level, in Frances’s Art of the Novella Reading Challenge, the object of which is to read and blog as many novellas as possible from the Melville House series. Because I can’t resist novellas, those editions, or the words “very limited time,” by the time that post was live I had already splurged on the full set. That was stupid—ever since they arrived, I’ve been having trouble keeping my hands off. August is too far away!

You couldn’t resist them either, could you?

But! Since I did, of course, already have some of these, now I have a few duplicates. Which means my binge becomes your significantly smaller gain. I’m giving away three titles, at least two of which are excellent:

• Freya of the Seven Isles by Joseph Conrad
• The Beach at Falesá by Robert Louis Stevenson
• First Love by Ivan Turgenev

You’ll receive the new copy, which is unread and has been in my smoking household for a few days, in a box. Just leave me a comment and let me know which you’d like; I’ll email you for mailing info. Since these are tiny, I’ll send them worldwide. First come, first served.

Oh, right—and this also serves, I suppose, as my official challenge announcement. I’m not really going to try for “bibliomaniac”…but I’d like to come close!

After The Shifting of the Fire, Ford Madox Ford’s next two books pretty much kept the atmosphere of the farce or comedy of errors, but shifted from the real, contemporary world to the realm of the fairy tale.

Published, again as H. Ford Hueffer, in 1892 (the same year as The Shifting of the Fire), The Brown Owl begins with an ailing king, who warns his daughter not to let a particular brown owl out of her sight when he is dead and gone. She doesn’t actually know of such an owl, but it soon appears, just at the necessary time. That is, when the king has died.

The princess doesn’t hesitate to keep her promise, though she soon finds the owl threatened by her doctor and various courtiers, especially the most powerful, Merrymineral. Merrymineral was the second-most-powerful magician in the land during the time of the king, and now he believes he’s moved up to the number-one slot. But the brown owl is there to protect the princess from his machinations.

Merrymineral eventually raises an army and comes back to the princess’s realm to threaten her. Her own nobles and vassals come to her defense, and she visits a lively fairy-tale front where she’s able to end the war by virtue of her common sense and reasonableness. But it’s not to be the end of Merrymineral, not quite yet.

The brown owl must still help her avoid marrying the wrong man and stumble into marrying the right one, of course, and then reveal his true nature. And then they all lived happily ever after! No, it really says that: “in a few days the Prince and Princess were married and lived happily ever afterwards.”

You would be forgiven for confusing the plot of this one ever so slightly with that of The Queen Who Flew, published two years later. In Ford’s third novel, a young, inexperienced, and extremely ignorant queen has no friends but a talking bat who lives in her garden. Tired of the constant antics of regents and revolutionaries, she makes the bat tell her how she can fly through the use of a special herb. Soon, she escapes over the garden wall and must try to make her way in the outside world, where she needs money to pay for food and no one listens to her imperious demands.

Her journey is good fun, with towers, witches, talking geese who turn out to be bewitched men, and finally a good blind farmer and his good mother, who are the first people the queen meets who can react to her normally, like a regular person. And…she gets married and lives happily ever after? Well, of course she does.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m being negative by calling these early works of Ford’s fluff. I really enjoyed reading them. But it’s a bit bizarre—how to get away from the continual refrain of “what is this?” Or “what was he doing?” I mean, I have been taking him at his word that he was not really writing, not really, until The Good Soldier—though I still have a long way to go until I get to 1914. I’m still loving the acerbic wit. The silly plotting is sort of a fun change, and Ford has an almost surprising sense of wholesome, but not cloying, enjoyment. Surprising until you remember he’s the man who invented Tietjens.

The solstice approacheth, so inspired in part by The Book Lady’s posts on summer reading, I thought I would preview some of my own, ahem, planned “beach reading.” (Scare quotes because the realness of the beach is a little bit questionable.)

Pschitt!

First, and obviously most important, the Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity, for which posting should be happening the week of June 27. Hornstrumpot, that is soon! Since the excellent Amateur Reader is careful to remind me that I am free to post whenever I like, I must exercise my freedom by posting on time. But only because he can’t make me!

Trilogy time!

That same week will mark the first posting for Richard’s group read of the Javier Marías trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. I’ll be reading one volume per month this summer, and am glad to finally be tackling this. And a little intimidated.

The Inheritors is a 1901 collaboration of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. I’ve had it on the shelf for a while now, and after re-reading The Good Soldier and Heart of Darkness felt inspired to finally make it happen. So I picked up…a bunch of other books. I’ve now read everything at least novella-length Conrad and Ford wrote leading up to 1901, so now it’s time for The Inheritors. I still have to post about the early Ford, and this will in theory mark the end of a subproject followed by the rest of Conrad and Ford in the not-too-distant future. The next Conrad novel up is Typhoon, and I’ve also got Ford’s memoir of Conrad on deck.

Of course, I started the Conrad/Ford project when I was in the middle of reading another author all the way through. The next Nabokov in the list is The Eye. I hope Emily (and others) will consider joining me again for this (or anything else!), though I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for it. Can you tell Nabokov is actually scaring me off a little? This is some tough beach reading. After The Eye: Glory.

I haven’t blogged yet about having gotten a Kindle (heavens! don’t kick me out of the club!), but I’ve been meaning to. In particular, I want to (think some more and then) write about how I’ve taken up using the free samples. I won’t say too much now, except that I sampled Swamplandia! and decided that this Karen Russell was a genuinely good contemporary writer, and immediately bought…a different book. As is my wont, I went with her earlier St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a book of stories that includes something of a prequel to Swamplandia!. I’m still hoping to write about it, but in case I don’t, I will say that I was thoroughly enjoying it until I started to feel like all the teenage narrators sounded too old, and then identical to an elderly and a third-person narrator. But I still really liked it, and preordered Swamplandia! in paperback, so round about the middle of July I’m hoping to pick that one up.

Uh oh...this one looks dangerous

Frances at Nonsuch Book has initiated a very dangerous challenge: to read all of Melville House’s Art of the Novella series in August. I have a bit of a love/hate thing for Melville House, but when it comes to these, it’s all love. All. Love. (Have you seen them?) I have at least one unread on the shelf now, and I’m sure I can find a few more. If only I had the whole month off. There are levels! And prizes!

Unlike Frances’s challenge, the upcoming Classics Circuit on John Steinbeck shouldn’t have seemed appealing to me at all; I’ve always rather hated Steinbeck. But I’ve had this strange work of his, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, ever since it was (re-?)published a few years ago, having heard it was “different,” or something. So it seems like a good time to polish that off. I do want to give some of his other work a chance too, maybe, someday. I think I’m supposed to like Tortilla Flat, does that sound right?

Think that’s enough, or what? Well I’m also in the middle of Robinson Crusoe, finally, which means maybe I’ll also be drawn to Muriel Spark’s second novel, Robinson, not to mention a hundred more sea-related narratives, or early novels, or Moll Flanders. And all this Guy de Maupassant sitting on my Kindle because of Ford and Conrad. And Stephen Crane, for the same reason. And more Robert Louis Stephenson, and Kipling. And Things Fall Apart. Oh, and Anthony, when are you up for that Goethe?

Anything sound enticing?

I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled Conrad programming to answer some questions posed by The Reading Ape as the last post in an excellent and thought-provoking series he’s done on issues in book blogging. I’ve been wanting to respond to the earlier entries, and may still do so in my sweet time, but tend to do more sighing and groaning than articulating on these topics. But here’s my shot at the questions.

1. What does book blogging do best?
Right away, I’m sighing and groaning a little bit again, because this question immediately brings up a problem. What does “book blogging” mean? There are a lot of different subgenres within that realm, and a lot of them do what they do really well. Blogging is a great platform, for example, for reporting on publishing industry news, real-life book tours, sharing photos of neat-looking libraries, and so on. But not only is that not what I do here, I don’t even read blogs like that.

I think in one sense what book blogging “does best” is devolve into an arm of the publishing industry consisting of a lot of enthusiastic and excited individuals all saying pretty much the same thing about a smallish pool of books.

I think in another sense what it does best is to unite a group of like-minded individuals to discuss books that they might never have a chance to discuss in real life, at least not with more than one or two people. It introduces people to things they have never heard of—things they would really have a hard time hearing of, not just some new release that didn’t get reviewed in The New York Times. They are a wonderful tool of and for amateurs and professionals alike to learn, exchange ideas, explore, &tc.

Ugh, I couldn’t really answer that one at all.

2. If you write a book blog, why do you?
This is easier. My primary reason for blogging is as a way to make myself think more about what I’ve read and hopefully synthesize those thoughts into something marginally interesting and/or meaningful. It provides a record of what I’ve read, but the writing process does much more than that by making my reading more active and requiring me to really think about what I’ve read afterward. And it’s helped me focus my reading, as the analysis I do leads to more and deeper ideas about connections between books and authors and more effective ways to follow the reading thread from one work to another as I go.

But without a really smart and supportive community of commenters, I doubt I would still be doing that. I work harder because I know the people who are reading deserve it—though I still don’t work nearly hard enough for you guys.

3. What do you think the future of book blogging is?
I think continued fragmentation is a big part of the future, including the professionalization of a subset of popular bloggers with wide appeal. Also continued growth of connections between bloggers and the industry.

4. What do your favorite book bloggers do?
My favorite book bloggers—and this term is really killing me, I normally say litbloggers—really. fucking. engage. with literature. And they read awesome stuff, old and new, well-known and obscure. Sometimes they make arguments, sometimes they only describe and tell me how great something is, but they almost always do it with examples from the text or at least specific explanations. They aren’t afraid to get past the plot or characterization and talk about language and structure, or to go against critics and other Important People.

5. If you could tell all book bloggers one thing, what would it be?
Just one? Proofread your posts!

Okay, here’s a better one: we don’t have to all be friends. As is the case with the internet overall, as blogging has moved beyond early adopters there seems to have been a tendency for a tyranny of niceness to develop. I am not nice, and while I’m also not mean I often feel dismayed when I see people seemingly cowed into an absurd kind of “tolerance” that stops them from saying anything is better or worse than anything else. It seems to be okay, for the most part, to judge a book, but judging anything else (say, a style of blogging about books), less so.

Oh, and one more: “book people” are not an ideologically uniform subsegment of the population. We don’t all support public libraries or tertiary education in the humanities, we don’t all think “buying local” has mystical economic benefits, and we aren’t all invested in the publishing industry as an immutable institution of civilization.

6. If you could change one thing about book blogging, what would it be?
I really don’t know that I would change much of anything, considering how many different blogs there are of different varieties. It would be nice if it were magically easier to find those I have a strong affinity for. Closer to the realm of reality (or is it?), I wish bloggers weren’t so close to the industry. Caring about publishing can get in the way of caring about literature, and I rarely enjoy any kind of blog written by an industry insider (or amateur who was subsumed by the industry). There’s just something about regular people writing about something they are interested in that’s part of what makes blogging special.

7. How do you think book blogging fits into the reading landscape?
For most people, it probably doesn’t fit in at all. Its biggest effect at this point is probably in marketing contemporary fiction and narrative nonfiction. But again, this really depends on the type of blog. For me, for the blogs I read, it’s more a learning and discussion medium, though I am frequently influenced to buy and read books based on the blogs I follow. Just usually not new ones.

8. What about your own book blogging would you like to do better/differently?
Um, all of it! I’d like to read more, think more, write more, think better, write better. Read better too. Sometimes I wish I had a magic formula to actually popularize a very niche blog, but that’s just silly blogger vanity. I guess my biggest wish is to look at an old post and not feel like an idiot. Once in a while it comes true.

On Saturday, Amanda at Dead White Guys posted about the sentiment that, even if it’s James Patterson or the Twilight series, “at least people are reading amirite NO YOU ARE NOT RIGHT.” I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment, and was excited to see someone else who “WOULD RATHER YOU WATCH EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION OR LISTEN TO NPR THAN READ SHIT BOOKS.” (It’s totally worth saying in all caps—although I’m not quite sure I “would rather” you do anything other than whatever you feel like, maybe that part should be lowercase.)

Anyway, lamenting that this is the stuff that most people do read, most of the time, she asks whether people are

actually stupider, or less appreciative of Good Writing than past generations? OR do good books have this air of Super Hard Snobbery around them that keeps most people away for fear that they will be bored/intimidated/feel stupid? Did the educational system and literary academia shroud good books in hardship?

Dickens may or may not have been the James Patterson of his day—the wholly different media landscape makes that a pretty faulty analogy, with Dickens likely writing for TV today—but in any case I think the real problem here is a nostalgia that ignores how basic a human desire is simple enjoyment. Last week The Reading Ape wrote about “The Tyranny of Pleasure,” and how “if you only or even primarily read ‘for fun,’ you are leaving the most complex, most nourishing, most soul-sustaining books on the shelf.” This isn’t a new characteristic of readers, or of people choosing a leisure activity. What’s more, I’d argue that someone who’s only reading “for fun” is just as likely not getting much more out of Dickens than Patterson, unless he’s simply getting more enjoyment, because Dickens is the better writer.

As I spent the afternoon reading the essays at the end of the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford himself spoke directly to the issue. “Let us now consider the audience to which the artist should address himself,” he says in his wonderful 1914 essay, “On Impressionism.” “Since the great majority of mankind are, on the surface, vulgar and trivial—the stuff to fill graveyards—the great majority of mankind will be easily and quickly affected by art which is vulgar and trivial,” he says; but greatness is still possible:

But, inasmuch as this world is a very miserable purgatory for most of us sons of men—who remain stuff with which graveyards are filled—inasmuch as horror, despair and incessant strivings are the lot of the most trivial of humanity, who endure them as a rule with commonsense and cheerfulness—so, if a really great master strike the note of horror, of despair, of striving, and so on, he will stir chords in the hearts of a larger number of people than those who are moved by the merely vulgar and the merely trivial. This is probably why Madame Bovary has sold more copies than any book ever published, except, of course, books purely religious. But the appeal of religious book is exactly similar.

Ford thinks the English reading public are idiots, and practically equates “intelligent” with “foreign” throughout the essay to emphasize the greater reading competence of the Continent. Flaubert is much idolized, and much decried the fact that Flaubert is too sexy for British and American tastes. A really wonderful and clear essay on literature and literary technique; I’m going to be spending more time with it this week as I get back into the blogging saddle with Ford and Joseph Conrad. I’ve got a whole literary impressionism thing going on. And this essay has given me a whole list of new things to read.

Anyway, as one of Amanda’s commenters says: “Most of the shit of yesteryear has been weeded out for the good stuff. So in 2150, Stephenie Meyer’ll be a footnote in some doctoral candidate’s thesis.” Or, the focus of an awesome niche litblog? Maybe not, but The Little Professor is such a thing now, for some questionable literature of yesteryear, and it’s always a fascinating read.