Hello and drum roll, please! The winner of this week’s drawing is Mary E Birnbaum! Mary, I’ll contact you to make arrangements to send your advance reading copy of Someone Always Nearby: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe and Maria Chabot, coming in early November.
Everyone: I enjoyed our book discussion this week—thanks to all who shared your childhood reading lists. The comments give us a glimpse of the reading history that so many of us share and that inevitably shaped our adult reading (and writing!) choices.
But those shared reading lists may also give us pause, and I think they should. For while our favorite books gave us comfort and a safe place to go when life got difficult, they also prescribed a world view that was decidedly WASP-ish.
In fact, as Louka points out in her comment, the books often show Others in clearly negative ways. She writes about her experience of re-reading one of the books much later: “As an adult, I was shocked to see that the unsavory, no-good villain in the story was named (get this) Bushy Trott, with an illustration showing him to be ugly and dark-skinned, with coarse features and kinky hair. Ugh.”
Yes, we get it. That is, we get, now, what we didn’t quite get, as kids: that while the Nancys and other similar series expanded the horizons of our possibilities, most of them narrowed those horizons to include People Just Like Us.
That’s why I invite us all to be aware of the flip side of the “comfort” coin. We need books that introduce us to People Other Than Ourselves. And we need to recognize and support the authors who have different stories to tell, the publishers who put that work out into the world, and the public and school librarians who insist on diversity as a book-selection principle.
Writing, publishing, buying, or shelving a book ought not to require a special courage. These days and in some places, it does. I know that many of you actively celebrate and support the brave people who stand up for the right to read. Some of you even sponsor or support little libraries of banned books. Thank you!
Climbing down from my soapbox to say that I’ll be back on Monday with a LifeScapes post. I want to tell you about MeadowKnoll, our Texas homestead. And spiders.
And as always, thanks for reading!
Susan
I agree with you, Susan! No librarian should live in fear of her job for putting any book she/he chooses in the library's bookshelves, not in America. But, as you've pointed out in the past, sadly this is not the case.
Well, in my opinion, you, Susan, are the kind of thinking person who SHOULD have a soapbox !!!
I grew up in the 50s like I imagine many of us reading your platform did. I can remember when my family finally got our first TV ! The programs geared toward children, young people and, indeed, even toward adults did present a very limited - sometimes distorted - view of American life - just like the books most of us usually read. One of the good things about reading those books as young people was that we were at least READING and developing an appetite for it. Because I enjoyed reading I eventually grew into reading not only for enjoyment, but also for information - to learn. I know about so much more than I’ve actually experienced and relate to people I’ve never actually met. I understand about situations and circumstances I’ve never been in. Reading has brought an awareness of so many things I would not be aware of without it ! A lot of the people I end up talking to who can easily exclude / demonize “Others”, have never read anything about “them” written by them. They’re not generally interested in reading to learn. Reading has been responsible for limiting my view of the world and responsible for broadening it.