A friend of mine posted a review of a book edited by J. Peder Zane, entitled The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.
It seemed like a really fun idea—I like hearing what writers read, and I
respect their opinions because they’re a class of people who actively
takes what they read in order to better their own craft. They are into
reading on a level that most of us aren’t, and so when a writer goes out
of his or her way to recommend a book, I reckon it’s a good idea to
listen.
Anyways, I clicked through the review to the main website and my morning was quickly ruined. A more accurate title for this book would be The Top Ten: Mostly White Writers Who Grew Up in Places Like the Places I Grew Up in Pick Their Favorite Books. I didn’t do an exhaustive inquiry into each of the 125 writers’ genetic lineages, but at a glance it seems like four or five of them are from non-European ancestry. Even fewer than that seem to have grown up in foreign book markets, or predominantly around foreign literary influences.
I realize this is picking a big fight, so let me take a breath and step back. The idea behind the book is great, and the content in the book is probably also quite interesting—but it is not, in fact, a very diverse list. I’d go as far to coin an adverb and call it navel-gazingly narrow. Books of this sort that purport to be knowledge-expanding surveys are rather, by surveying a more or less sociologically and culturally similar group of people are building walls between America and the rest of the world, culturally speaking.
I have met very few Japanese people who have ever read Shakespeare. They know who he is, but they don’t spend an awful lot of time studying him in school. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that nearly unbelievable? How can you say you know good literature—that you’re a book-lover, even—without knowing about the gorgeous turns of phrase and the artful tension between the various characters in any of the scenes of Murasaki Shikibu? I mean Shakespeare.
See what I did there? Yeah.
The problem with The Top Ten isn’t the authors’ various lists. Those lists are their own, honestly considered, top ten most beloved books. The problem is the collection of authors. Imagine a similar book concerning food: the editor asked 125 chefs from around the country what their top 10 favorite dishes were. These chefs would have been from multiple socio-economic backgrounds—some grew up poor, some rich, some black, some white, some from culinary families, some not. Some of them like sushi and some of them like escargot; some of them like beer and some of them like wine: but I can almost guarantee you that the ultimate Top Top Ten list will contain, somewhere, chicken wings, and somewhere else hamburgers. Because Americans, regardless of your own personal upbringing or background, get around to eating a lot of hamburgers and chicken wings in their lifetime. If, however, you only surveyed 25 American chefs and left the remaining 100 spots to chefs from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Central America, and all the different bits and pieces of Asia, I bet hamburgers and chicken wings would be weeded out of the list, because you will have introduced a much more representative amount of people to your list, and thus will have ended up with a wider variety of foods from which to concoct a final, comprehensive average of the Top Top Ten foods.
The chicken wings and burger selections here strike me particularly hard with The Great Gatsby. It's a great book, unarguably. But its particular fame is due in large part to it being chosen somewhat randomly to hand out to American GIs during World War 2. By the 1950s, the book was chosen by school boards staffed with many of these former soldiers to be included in the national curriculum. So it comes as no surprise that Fitzgerald's book is on so many American-raised authors' top ten lists--but I reckon that a survey with more authors from places like Iceland, Egypt, or China would have had less exposure to the American high school literary canon and would have chosen a different variety of books for their top ten lists.
(Or maybe not. Japan's Haruki Murakami considers The Great Gatsby his favorite book and credits it with launching his literary career.)
Anyways, I’m just annoyed that lots of people won't see the need to branch out from this type of survey. This is meant to be the age of (economic yes, but also cultural) globalism and, while I’m busy enough as an English teacher in Japan trying to teach my students how and why to be more rational against certain seemingly innocent notions of cultural superiority or inferiority, it seems that even from a circle that I expected to be more global-minded, the dire meme of navel-gazing is still holding on tight.
I shall tell you now, literary America, what I often have cause to tell my students:
Think better. You have the tools and you have the power.
Anyways, I clicked through the review to the main website and my morning was quickly ruined. A more accurate title for this book would be The Top Ten: Mostly White Writers Who Grew Up in Places Like the Places I Grew Up in Pick Their Favorite Books. I didn’t do an exhaustive inquiry into each of the 125 writers’ genetic lineages, but at a glance it seems like four or five of them are from non-European ancestry. Even fewer than that seem to have grown up in foreign book markets, or predominantly around foreign literary influences.
I realize this is picking a big fight, so let me take a breath and step back. The idea behind the book is great, and the content in the book is probably also quite interesting—but it is not, in fact, a very diverse list. I’d go as far to coin an adverb and call it navel-gazingly narrow. Books of this sort that purport to be knowledge-expanding surveys are rather, by surveying a more or less sociologically and culturally similar group of people are building walls between America and the rest of the world, culturally speaking.
I have met very few Japanese people who have ever read Shakespeare. They know who he is, but they don’t spend an awful lot of time studying him in school. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that nearly unbelievable? How can you say you know good literature—that you’re a book-lover, even—without knowing about the gorgeous turns of phrase and the artful tension between the various characters in any of the scenes of Murasaki Shikibu? I mean Shakespeare.
See what I did there? Yeah.
The problem with The Top Ten isn’t the authors’ various lists. Those lists are their own, honestly considered, top ten most beloved books. The problem is the collection of authors. Imagine a similar book concerning food: the editor asked 125 chefs from around the country what their top 10 favorite dishes were. These chefs would have been from multiple socio-economic backgrounds—some grew up poor, some rich, some black, some white, some from culinary families, some not. Some of them like sushi and some of them like escargot; some of them like beer and some of them like wine: but I can almost guarantee you that the ultimate Top Top Ten list will contain, somewhere, chicken wings, and somewhere else hamburgers. Because Americans, regardless of your own personal upbringing or background, get around to eating a lot of hamburgers and chicken wings in their lifetime. If, however, you only surveyed 25 American chefs and left the remaining 100 spots to chefs from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Central America, and all the different bits and pieces of Asia, I bet hamburgers and chicken wings would be weeded out of the list, because you will have introduced a much more representative amount of people to your list, and thus will have ended up with a wider variety of foods from which to concoct a final, comprehensive average of the Top Top Ten foods.
The chicken wings and burger selections here strike me particularly hard with The Great Gatsby. It's a great book, unarguably. But its particular fame is due in large part to it being chosen somewhat randomly to hand out to American GIs during World War 2. By the 1950s, the book was chosen by school boards staffed with many of these former soldiers to be included in the national curriculum. So it comes as no surprise that Fitzgerald's book is on so many American-raised authors' top ten lists--but I reckon that a survey with more authors from places like Iceland, Egypt, or China would have had less exposure to the American high school literary canon and would have chosen a different variety of books for their top ten lists.
(Or maybe not. Japan's Haruki Murakami considers The Great Gatsby his favorite book and credits it with launching his literary career.)
Anyways, I’m just annoyed that lots of people won't see the need to branch out from this type of survey. This is meant to be the age of (economic yes, but also cultural) globalism and, while I’m busy enough as an English teacher in Japan trying to teach my students how and why to be more rational against certain seemingly innocent notions of cultural superiority or inferiority, it seems that even from a circle that I expected to be more global-minded, the dire meme of navel-gazing is still holding on tight.
I shall tell you now, literary America, what I often have cause to tell my students:
Think better. You have the tools and you have the power.
No comments:
Post a Comment