brief literary thoughts

Things have been a bit dour here lately so I thought I’d share some lighter fair for today.

The New York Times released their 100 best novels of the 21st century.

It’s worth asking why this list even exists so early in this century, but I’ve been seeing a lot of similar lists coming out. And I wonder why people would begin ranking things already, especially since a century takes some time to really become itself, in a historical sense. But the obvious answer is that these kinds of lists lead to lots of clicks and engagement.

I didn’t think I’d care much about a list like this which is why I didn’t take a look until last week, but these kinds of lists almost demand that you respond. What I find most curious about it is how many of the books on here are, I think, very bad. But rather than dive deep into the weeds, I’ll just leave some brief reviews:

• My Brilliant Friend - 10/10 for the whole series. Wrote about it here.

• The Warmth of Other Suns - 10/10. Exhaustive (a recurring theme for me in nonfiction) but also beautiful and tragic, following the stories of a lot of individual people. Reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich a bit, which is a good thing. Speaking of which...

• Secondhand Time - 10/10. Absolutely fascinating oral history from the last generation of Soviets.

• Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies - 10/10. The voice alone is enough to carry you. The most addictive competence porn around. The BBC series is quite good too.

• 2666 - 8/10. A big ruined cathedral of a novel. Sprawling and chaotic and grisly.

• The Savage Detectives - 10/10. Polyphonic and dizzying and a huge impact on my own writing, especially my first novel.

• Oscar Wao - 1/10. Terrible.

• The Underground Railroad - 7/10. Whitehead is a great writer and I love a lot about this novel, especially the way it edges into magical realism.

• Never Let Me Go - 10/10. One of my all time favorite novels. Too much to say about it. Wrote very briefly about it here previously.

• The Road - 10/10. Maybe the best novel by one of the best novelists. Wrote about it briefly here.

• Lincoln in the Bardo - 3/10. Hated it! I found the polyphonic nature of it an enormous weakness here, though certain images and sequences within the novel are 10/10.

• Pachinko - 8/10. Follows generations of a family. Nothing special but also consistently very good.

• Evicted - 9/10. Pretty harrowing stuff.

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers - 7/10. Intense and interesting.

• Cloud Atlas - 8/10. Another ruined cathedral of a novel whose ambitions overreach the author's skill, but that makes it all the more worth loving.

• Sing, Unburied, Sing - 8/10. My least favorite Jesmyn Ward (though I haven't read her newest novel). One of the best opening chapters of any book. The rest is very good.

• Salvage the Bones - 10/10. Conceptually one of my favorite novels for what it does and how it looks so closely at daily life. Then Hurricane Katrina happens.

• Men We Reaped - 8/10. A memoir about her family and especially her brother. I don't generally like memoir but I think this is very good. Mostly because of Ward's abilities as a writer and her keen interest in people.

• Citizen - Can't remember it. A book length poem that seemed very important in 2014.

• Fun Home - 2/10. Dull and self-absorbed.

• Between the World and Me - 7/10. Should be required reading for 8th graders.

• A Brief History of Seven Killings - 4/10. Despite such a low rating, I actually would recommend this to anyone. It's a finished cathedral of a novel, but the cathedral feels like some of the chapels within are about to fall over. A hugely ambitious novel.

• Postwar - 10/10. Exhaustive look at the history of Europe after WWII.

• The Fifth Season - 8/10. Pretty good! Probably should have been a standalone.

• The Goldfinch - 1/10. Hated it! Wrote about it.

• Persepolis - 7/10. Pretty good. I'm not the target for comic books but this is fascinating.

• The Vegetarian - 6/10. Weird and spare, but in a good way. Very Korean.

• Train Dreams - 10/10. One of the best.

• Tree of Smoke - 3/10. Dull! And I really like Denis Johnson.

• Nickel and Dimed - 8/10. Not a lot to say except that it's great. Or rather, I have too much to say about this book and the author. Maybe I’ll get to it someday.

• Middlesex - Can't really remember but I do remember being very underwhelmed. A great writer, though. I still think about the scene of the dad working in the factory.

• The Plot Against America - 7/10. In some ways this is what I wish Roth had done more of. In other ways, it's missing what makes Roth special.

• The New Jim Crow - 10/10. Nothing really to say. It's one of the most important books of the century, I think.

• Exit West - Can't remember anything about it.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - 7/10. I hate and love many things about this book, but it is a compelling and addictive read about love and friendship and creation.

• When We Cease to Understand the World - 9/10. A very peculiar novel that straddles the line of nonfiction and fiction.

• The Story of the Lost Child - 9/10. Very similar to her Neapolitan novels, though maybe weaker for that reason.

• Frederick Douglass 9/10. I like it!

• The Sympathizer - 5/10. Tedious.

• Station Eleven - 3/10. I really dislike this book though I don't completely remember why anymore.

I would love to fight all of you over these books.

The DISCOURSE happened recently over how many pages per day a college student of literature should be expected to read. Apparently the benchmark was about 100. This was quickly called racist because of course it was, but I found this troubling.

Not the claim that reading a lot is racist but that this should even really be a debate or a provocative statement. Especially since so many people began talking about how difficult it is for them to sit and read for extended periods of time without checking their phones.

This is pretty bleak.

But also a reminder to turn off all notifications on your phone and to silence it and also maybe to throw it in the river.

And then a real life publication posted some ragebait about how straight men don’t read fiction. Now, we don’t have to take this seriously, though you can read it here. This was written and published to generate clicks and social media engagement and it succeeded.

But I think it’s worth taking the premise, even if it’s obviously wrong, seriously for a moment. Because I do think we all recognize that something unpleasant is happening with men and young men.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a few years but I can’t quite get to it. Perhaps because there is no clear answer. Though I do think part of it has to do with the way culture has changed to attempt to level the playing field.

Men have been the dominant players in culture and politics for most of human history. There are plenty of counterexamples but I think we can generalize here and say that most of the world revolved around men.

In the last few decades, we as a culture have tried to address this by promoting women as capable humans. All well and good and long overdue. But I do think the messaging has gone quite far in the other direction. Now men grow up in a world where they are castigated by media for their gender. And while we’ve done much to give girls positive role models, it seems like we’ve often done this at the expense of boys.

And I think this is most often true in the arts. The New York Times 100 Best Novel list, for example, is proud of how few men are in the top 10. Which is a bit odd. But we are at a place where people take pride in not reading men or straight white men or some kind of identity that almost always includes men.

It’s understandable that we want to correct history in some manner and make up for the generations of women who were shoved down into the mud to make way for men of less ability. That’s all fine, in theory.

But these boys growing up now are not interested in historical prejudices. This is their life. It’s their time to be alive. If all they hear from certain sectors of arts and culture and politics is that men are problematic, perhaps they’ll reject the people who say this about them. And as we see fewer men go to college and more men fall into diseases of despair, maybe we should consider reaching out to them.

And so is it any wonder that they have drifted towards weird internet personalities that tell them that there’s nothing wrong with being a man and that being a man is good?

There’s more to say on this topic but I mention it because the piece in question is itself a statement that there is something wrong with being a man and that the solution is to, I guess, read some romantasy.

Perhaps we can think a bit harder about this, yes?