Choosing What We Read
| Published on 1 Jul 2009 at 1:24 pm.
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Filed under Books. |
There’s a scene in The Jane Austen Book Club that has stuck with me for weeks now. The movie is about five women and a man who form a book club to read one Austen book a month. The man is a relative stranger invited by one of the women to round out the six. The theme of the movie is how applicable the books are to the lives of the members of the book club. It’s a good movie, I recommend watching it.
The lone man (Grigg) in the group is, among other things, a science fiction writer and brings his science fiction sensibility to the club. Only he is pooh-poohed for this sensibility because not only has he not read any Austen before (neither have I), he buys a compendium instead of the books individually.
He has asked the woman (Jocelyn) who invited him into the club repeatedly to read his favourite books by Ursula K. LeGuin, but she keeps refusing. Finally, he puts her on the spot.
“Why won’t you read them?”
She squirms and then says, “Because I like stories with real people in them, not aliens and robots.”
I’m paraphrasing here but the snobbery against science fiction / fantasy is all too real. The misperception is that science fiction / fantasy really is all about robots and aliens and lifestyles too far out to relate to. And some of it is and some of it is written by complete hacks who have no business being published, much less being read. The perception is that if it features what’s considered a “non-human” life form on a planet that’s not Earth then it’s not about “real” things. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
For all of his misogyny and sexist writing, Robert Heinlein wrote specifically about human relations and the complexities of love in all its forms, often seen through the eyes of an alien who has no concept of human emotions. For all my rantings about Heinlein being a hack, I still hold Stranger in a Strange Land to be one of the best books written about human emotions. Heinlein was one of the pioneers and “Grand Masters” of the genre and I came to him after reading books that were better written and had more balanced views of the genders, so my calling him a hack is probably unfair and I’m okay with that.
It was Karen’s review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go that reminded me of how much I disliked Jocelyn’s attitude toward science fiction. Karen says, “… I was turned off by the idea that it would be futuristic, sci-fi, upsetting, and just plain weird.” Which I think is the attitude of a lot of people when they think about science fiction. “Just plain weird.”
I don’t know what Karen’s exposure to science fiction is, and she does go on to say that she’s not a fan of dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and if that’s all her exposure to the genre has been than she has good reason to be hesitant about science fiction. But it’s not all dystopian and weird. Futuristic, yes.
Science fiction often deals with the future. What’s it going to look like? What will happen if “rockets land on the moon” or “we have to find another planet to live on” or “the only people that have to work are the ones designing and operating the tools that do all the work?” Isaac Asimov was an extremely prolific writer, he was also a polymath and a scientist. His books dealt with some of these very topics.
For all his disagreeable politics, Orson Scott Card is one of my favourite authors. He explores spirituality, mysticism and human relations in a way that sparks my own soul-searching. The Ender saga is highly readable and has as one of its themes “what do we do when the world is over-populated and children are bred and trained to save the world?” I’ve read the first three or four books several times.
Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts wrote some of the most interesting characterizations and political intrigue in their Empire trilogy, focused on a young woman’s survival and rise to power in a pseudo-Asian setting. And I don’t remember whether it was Feist/Wurts or Card who wrote about a female character afflicted with such a terrible case of OCD she had to count the lines on her floor in order to function.
My reading interests run wide, I have a shallow knowledge of many genres. In going through my book list this summer I’ve noticed some interesting trends. Mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, non-fiction, true crime, biographies, books about films and Hollywood and celebrity, South American authors, religion; I’ve read a lot of books in a lot of different topics. I’m just now coming to some of the classics that I probably should have been exposed to earlier in life.
A Lit instructor told me, “I would think if you want to be a writer you would want to have read the classics and explore the ways in which they were written.” Well, yes that’s true. I do want to, but I also want to explore other books. Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Christopher Hitchens, Karen Armstrong, Guillermo Martinez … the list goes on and on and on. I am practically omnivorous when it comes to books and I love summer breaks because they allow me to read what I want to read. While working towards my BA is the best thing I have ever done in my life and the readings have almost always been interesting and eye-opening, the thing I miss most is being able to range through my own library and pick my own reading list.
It’s certain that my tastes have changed over the years and will more than likely continue to change. I’ve been doing a lot of “Ewwwww! What was I thinking?” as I go over the list of books I’ve read in the past couple of decades. We don’t always make good choices when we read but the bad choices are what lead us to what we truly love and if we refuse to read a book simply because of the genre it’s categorized in, we’re doing ourselves a disservice.
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