I like what I like

[liv]

jack posted a list of his favourite books, and over on the LJ version of the post, daharyn commented: Look at all the (white) dudes on that list! This is a great example of how canon becomes canon--"oh, well, I read stuff I like," [...] ends up cutting out voices that don't fit the mold.

I am kind of resistant to diversity auditing booklists, especially ones that are just personal taste lists; it makes somewhat more sense with lists that are intended to be representative or recognize merit or significance. But then again, best-of lists are a classic way to get conversations going, so why not follow suit?

Books I like, books that mean something to me, not necessarily great books. I'm just writing down what comes to mind, trying to avoid picking and choosing stuff that will make me look good either from a literary respect point of view or a diversity point of view. I'm sure I'll forget something that I actually love but just isn't springing to mind at the moment. And I make no attempt to put this into any kind of order, just writing down stuff as it occurs to me. Also jack divided his list into general books and classics; in some ways, classics are fairly obviously going to be canon, otherwise they wouldn't exactly be classics, but there you go.

Favourites:

• AS Byatt: Babel Tower. Female, white, very much part of the literary establishment.
• Salman Rushdie: The ground beneath her feet. Male, Asian. Writes in standard English but somewhat of an insider perspective on non-anglo cultures. About as literary establishment as you get.
• Chaim Potok: The book of lights. Male, white according to contemporary American classifications, but writing from an insider perspective about immigrant and third culture experiences.
• GB Edwards: The book of Ebenezer le Page. Male. Tricky to classify otherwise; Edwards was white and a British citizen, but from a minority culture namely the Channel Islands, and he writes in a non-hegemonic dialect of English even if I can't exactly call it global English. Completely obscure (undeservedly, in my opinion!)
• Jane Gardam: most of her stuff but especially The summer after the funeral. Female. White AFAIK, anglo, not particularly canon but fairly normative characters and themes.
• William Horwood: Skallagrigg (this is an utterly terrible book in many ways but I read it at just the right age and it had a big impact on me). Male. Probably white based on what I know of his background. Not canon or even really literature, ephemeral semi-genre stuff. Disabled characters but I don't think the author identifies as disabled.
• William Goldman: The color of light. Male. Racial identity unknown to me, anglo, mostly normative characters and themes. Not really canon I think, but in the same style as stuff that is.
• Ian McDonald: most stuff, especially Terminal Café. Male, white, writes in standard English, though he comes from a white-skinned ethnic / cultural minority within the UK. Writes in diverse settings mostly from an outsider (arguably colonialist) perspective. SF canon.
• Mary Gentle: Golden Witchbreed. Female. Racial identity not known to me. Anglo. SF canon.
• Anne Michaels: Fugitive pieces. Female. Anglophone Canadian. Racial identity unknown to me. Literary style but fairly obscure.
• George RR Martin: The Armageddon Rag. Male. White AFAIK. SF/F canon, normative characters.
• Lynne Reid Banks: The L-shaped room. Female. White AFAIK. Middle-brow stuff, not exactly canon, fairly normative characters.

Classics

• JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. Male. White anglo. Pretty much the foundation of the SF/F canon.
• Euripides, especially Hippolytus. Male. Counts as white by contemporary American standards, but non-Anglo. Greek classics were canon in my culture before there even was an English language canon, so it's presumptuous to claim Euripides as either anglo or not anglo.
• Simone de Beauvoir: Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. Female. White, non-anglo.
• Rudyard Kipling: Kim. Male. White, anglo, gets more than his fair share of blame for being the ultimate symbol of colonialist literature.
• John Steinbeck, especially East of Eden. Male. White, anglo, very much canon, white American characters.
• Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac. Male. Racial identity not known to me. Non-anglo.
• Ruth. Author unknown, presumably middle-eastern though. Non-anglo but absolutely literally canon.
• Vergil, especially Aeneid II, III and IV. Male. Counts as white according to contemporary American racial politics, but non-anglo. Pre English language canon.
• Denis Diderot: Jacques le fataliste et son maître. Male. White AFAIK. Non-anglo.

I think I have favourited slightly more women than jack, but that's at least partly because I read more of the kind of litfic that is more female dominated than jack's preferred genres. I don't seek out female writers at all.

The only definitely non-white author here is Rushdie, but it feels odd to count Potok and the people dating from before the era of white supremacy as "white". And I'm second guessing myself horribly over Samuel Delany; I like Triton very much indeed, but I left it out of the list because I fear that it only came to mind because I was thinking about racial diversity and Delany is such an obvious example of an African-American author. I genuinely don't know the race of most authors I read, unless I happen to have read (and remembered) a discussion of how race plays into their work. So it's not that I'm reading mostly white authors because I actively choose to do so, but it seems very likely that stuff liked by my mostly white circle and stuff by white authors that gets published and promoted is more likely to come to my attention than stuff by minority authors.

I do read works in translation and works in global Englishes, but that depends on what gets published and marketed to me. And very few such texts have made it to my list of absolute favourites, which I think is partly because they're under-represented in my total reading and partly because I have the most experience of UK and American English literature so I'm more likely to be drawn to it. I find most of magic realism really difficult, for example, and where authors like Rushdie or McDonald cross genres I almost always prefer their more conventional and less magic realist works. There's a few French books in the classics list because I read French reasonably fluently (and can't really read a novel in any other language but English), and while my French reading isn't exclusively classics, they're the ones that I'm most likely to be aware of; I no longer keep up with contemporary French writing.

Comments

[forestofglory]

I think it totally find for people to like what they like. Especially since we often imprint on things at a young age.

I don't write lists of favorite books for all the self-second guessing reasons you mentioned. (The list of books I have wrote recently where based around a themes, and did think about diversity a little bit.)

I don't seek out female authors -- because without meaning to I read more books by women than by men. I think because I'm interested in themes that women are more likely to write about. I do seek out authors of color, because I think I'm less likely to stumble upon them by accident, thanks to discrimination at all stages in the publish process.

However this is work -- I understand if other people want chose their battles, and not spend energy when they could be reading. I do try to promote works by PoC so my friends can do less of this work. But reading is still very personal.

Also reading your list I think that we have quite different tastes in books.

[liv]

Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I think a big chunk of my list of favourites is stuff I happened to come across as a child or teenager or via school, and that's subject to a set of biases which might not be exactly the same as my personal biases. Another source of bias is where I buy my books from, I tend to get a lot of my reading material from libraries and charity shops and if those are in majority-white areas of the country, well, I'll end up with more books by white authors than if I selected my books purely at random. (But nobody selects reading material purely at random!)

I think the argument for seeking out more books by authors of colour in order to counteract the discrimination in publishing and marketing does make sense. I do this a little bit, though not systematically, because I pay attention to discussions of diverse voices in genres I'm interested in and use those as a source of recommendations as well as simply relying on friends and books by authors I already know I like. But I don't, for example, set myself a target to read so many books by authors of colour. Also I'm more interested in international literature, global Englishes, works in translation and novels by people writing in English from a non-US and non-UK perspective, than I am in specifically looking for books written by mainstream Americans who happen to have hyphenated identities. Also books set in milieux I'm not familiar with and with diverse characters, and obviously there's some advantage if the author is writing about their own culture rather than taking an exoticizing / colonial point of view.

[forestofglory]

Oh, I don't have quota system either. But it something I consider when deciding to read a book and I seek out reviews of such books.

I should consider nationality more as well too.

[ptc24]

This is something I, err, might have hastily reacted to on Jack's page. There are plenty of women on my bookshelves, but I thought I'd audit for known-to-me-to-be non-white authors; this isn't a best-of. So I've got:

Marjane Satrapi - essentially autobiographical works
Shappi Khorsandi - more autobiography
M. Ghandi - autobiography (unread)
Amin Maalouf - The Crusades through Arab eyes
Albert Hourani - A History of the Arab Peoples (I got a few pages in)
Jung Chang (+ Jon Halliday) - MAO: The Unknown Story (and unread, too)
Toshiro Kageyama - Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go
Ha-Joon Chang - 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
traditional, trans. Husain Haddawy - The Arabian Nights
Madhur Jaffrey - Eastern Vegeterian Cooking (largely unused)

So most of the one's I've actually read I have fond memories of (except the Arabian Nights which didn't do all that much for me). The one standout is Ha-Joon Chang, writing about economics; otherwise, it's people writing about things to do with their background. It's somewhat similar to various other books I have where you have trans* people (or partners) writing about trans* issues and (known to me to be) non-neurotypical people writing about non-neurotypicallity - compare with lots of books by women about things not specially to do with women. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there are authors on my bookshelf with diversities I don't know about. There's also my PhD thesis, which perhaps be could be counted for a diversity or two, although none I knew about at the time.

By approximate width of books, the non-white part of my bookshelves is about 1/23 of it. That's quite low. The small sample contains more than it's fair share of really good books and unread books, I think.

There's also my kindle, with Kaiser Fung writing "Numbers Rule Your World" and Bannerjee writing "Poor Economics" (another good one!). Oh, and I forgot another go book and another couple of cookery books from my bookshelf.

The only thing that might count as fiction in that list is the Arabian Nights.

[liv]

Yeah, if I wanted to do this properly rather than just messing around, it would make more sense to look at my bookshelves, or at the reasonably comprehensive list I've made of everything I've read for the past decade. "Favourite" books are really not representative. But I kind of can't be bothered, at least partly because it's actually really hard to go through a big list of authors and assign racial identities. You can't tell from the names, you can't tell from photos, and even if you do know something about their biography you don't know how they identify, and it's really murky. Even gender I'm not entirely happy with; I am making the assumption that all these authors are the obvious gender you'd expect from their names and pronouns, but that's still a bit dodgy.

[jenett]

Fascinating. I look at this, and I think that my favourite books list - by which I mean the ones I come back to again and again, the ones that have made me think of the world in new ways, shaped what I'm doing - would not reflect my larger reading tastes.

First off, for pleasure reading, I read about half non-fiction (mostly popular non-fiction or religious stuff) and very few of those titles would make it onto my favourite books lists. Some of them I come back to after time, but most of them, I read, I'm glad I read them, but they aren't core to my understanding of myself (which is really what a lot of my favourite books are)

Second, when I've got the brain cycles for it (and I'm not either totally consumed with project-focused reading or with comfort reading), I make a point of reading a book from outside my usual preferences most months.

(I picked up the habit from a presentation Nancy Pearl did to librarians. It's less crucial for me in the current job, because I don't do reader's advisory, but I still like it.) That means topics or styles of writing I wouldn't pick up, but also genres and subgenres and so on.

I do not automatically select for gender or ethnic or cultural background when I make those picks - I care more about genre and style - but I do poke at it, and when I've kept lists of future reading for that, I do try to balance it. Unfortunately, I've been less able to spare the brain for it the last couple of years, and have been sticking to either things that feed specific projects, or that are things I know I can process usefully for pleasure reading.

My favourite books list *would* be heavily female on the author side, though - without listing, I'd have trouble giving a precise number, but at least half, and probably more like 2/3. It would be heavy on stuff coming out of female experience of academic settings (Pamela Dean, Donna Tartt, Dorothy L. Sayers, among others) and a lot of my favourite books are about dealing with the conflict between action and thought, or between narrative and meaning. But they're pretty much all people from a particular kind of European model of learning and academics.

I am, however, totally with you on Euripides. Who I adore.

[liv]

I definitely agree that favourite books aren't representative of my reading habits, especially not my current reading habits, since many of my favourites I encountered when I was much younger. It's also probably true that if absolutely all my favourite authors are white, that may well say something about my reading habits being narrower than they need to be.

I do read a lot of books by and about European-style academic women, especially mid-20^th century Brits. In fact I suspect if I looked at everything I read rather than the most memorable or significant to me books, it would probably skew quite female.

I definitely like the idea of regularly reading something outside one's usual preferences. I am not entirely systematic about doing that, but I do try to read a lot of reviews of stuff that isn't what I'd automatically pick up. And I deliberately wander into libraries or charity shops and take gambles on books I know nothing about but just like the look of. I can see the argument for making more effort to include ethnic and cultural diversity in my attempts to broaden my reading habits, but I don't really have that as a specific aim right now.

The other thing that happens quite a lot with me is that when I meet a new partner or get to be close friends with someone, I spend a few years reading everything that they love. I haven't started that shape of new relationship for a while, but I think some of my preferences are shaped by a bit of a history of dating people who are highly literate in the kind of "hard" SF that tends to be more dominated by white male authors than the general category of "books that I like" would be.

[jack]

Your favourites are much more classic-y than my classics :)

[liv]

Heh. I had that kind of education. And I have read a fair number of the standard Victorian works that form the core of the modern official canon, in as far as there is such a thing, but none of those make it to my favourites list.

[naath]

I'm, like, super bad at having favourites.

However now it occurs to me that I could track diversity stats in the Library Database That I Keep Saying I'll Make... (I keep coming up with New! Fun! Ways of organising the information and so forth; and notably *failing* to do the data entry part...)

[liv]

Yeah, I'm terrible at having favourites, I can never cope with "what's your favourite book" or even "what are the top ten". But I thought I could manage just brainstorming without trying to put things in order or make sure that the list was representative or truly excellent.

Library database project sounds interesting, but I can imagine there's a big activation barrier!

[naath]

The data entry is PAIN.

I think maybe a barcode scanner would help. Not sure.

I think it would be a good My First Database project, if only I could be arsed with the data entry.

[vatine]

Barcode scanner and a lookup mechanism to "large source of bibliographic info", with some hand-editing (I have somewhere in the region of 30 books that are pre-ISBN, so cannot even be looked-up that way).

The alternative is "take a stack of books, do data entry, maybe via a bulk-editing interface", that is how I did my initial book entry. But that was only 600-odd books.

[(Anonymous)]

I think LJ user toothycat has a barcode scanner and some software to get ISBNs from it, which they might be willing to lend to you if you're in Cambridge.

- alextfish has never managed to sign in to dw successfully and doesn't want to try now.

[jack]

You probably already know this better than me, but my approach for this sort of thing is to say "ok, make a clean slate, at least make sure all NEW books are added to a database" and I'll add all the existing books if I have time.

That way, if I (hypothetically) procrastinate for 10 years before getting to it, presto, instead of being 0% done, I'm 90% done :)

[jack]

Yeah, I'm terrible at having favourites,

I always sucked at this. Massively exaggerated conversation from young!Jack

Them: What's your favourite film?
Me: ...
Them: Oh, right, I forgot you're you. What's your favourite book?
Me: That is not the problem I have answering that question.

But I quickly realised that most people when they say favourite don't mean what I think of as favourite. At best a local maximum, not necessarily an absolute maximum. So my answer to the question asked and the question meant is usually something like "I don't know, but I Cryptonomicon is the most me book," or "I don't know, but name of the wind is my latest favourite book".

That's why my lists are entitled "10-20 books I happen to have liked recently" not "best 10 books in the world" and why cracked.com is cracked.com and I'm not :)

[damerell]

The tone of that comment leaves me wanting to be contrary and read nothing but dead white straight men for a bit. I'm currently rereading Excession, and sadly Banksie does now qualify. :-/

[marymac]

I'm reading the late and lamented too. Heaney, in my case.

If I got that comment on a list of my favourites (top of my head - Heaney, Yeats, Kate O'Brien, Lady Gregory), I'd be very restrainedly asking that person to go away and come back when they knew what they were talking about.

But there, I am a snarly combative person when it comes to books.

[liv]

Yes, I don't think diversity auditing people's personal taste is usually helpful, tbh. If there's a literary prize or a definitive list of the best examples of a genre that is really biased towards white men, well, that's worth at least commenting on. But talking about personal favourites usually just makes people snarly and doesn't really achieve much.

Also, Irish writers, ai-yi-i. In the US ethnically Irish people count as white and it's considered really bad form to mention their ethnic origin in a discussion of racism, from what I can gather. In Britain Irish people are to my mind fairly obviously a cultural and ethnic minority, it's uninformative to regard them as if they were simply unmarked or part of the hegemonic culture. But there's no sensible way to talk about this with an international audience, it just ends up offending everybody.

[marymac]

Yeah, Irish writers and the Ascendancy, and the Troubles and post-colonialism-only-not-really, ack, it goes forever.

The one I get really defensive of is Kate O'Brian. I think I'm keeping Land of Spices in print single-handed, every time I buy a copy one of my mum's friends disappears with it.

[liv]

I think the conclusion is, I should add Kate O'Brien to my to-read list :-)

[marymac]

I think so. Any book that leads to two grown women* squabbling over it in Clery's cafe has merit.

*Not the proudest moment ever for me or E, no.

[liv]

That'd work too. You can pretty much pick writers from one identity category and not run out of interesting things to read. I suspect your reaction to the tone is partly a cultural communication issue; I don't feel entirely comfortable either with what I think of as a rather American liberal approach to thinking about literary diversity.

I think if I did nothing at all to try to expand my range of reading, I'd default to mostly contemporary or recently dead white women, and they'd probably mostly be straight just given that most people are straight. But sure, there are plenty of good dead white straight male writers out there. As far as there is an issue at all, which I don't think is really demonstrated by the linked discussion, I think it's that rather mediocre writers get more prominence and success than they deserve simply by virtue of being white straight men. There's potentially a selection effect in what gets published in the first place, and what continues to be published after the author is dead and hangs around long enough to acquire the patina of "classic" status. But I could certainly read nothing but excellent literature for the rest of my life without touching anything by a woman or a Queer person or a person of colour or someone from any culture other than the UK or the US, I just don't see any particular merit in doing that.

[desperance]

If it matters, I can confirm your assumptions about William Horwood; he's certainly white, and he doesn't identify as disabled himself; his daughter has cerebral palsy, and it was his relationship with her and his experiences with her care that were the driver for Skallagrigg.

[liv]

Heh, I'm just impressed that anyone apart from me has even heard of Horwood, let alone knows the details of his background. I don't quite have positive evidence that he's white, but it does seem very likely on balance.

[blue_mai]

did I recommend that back in the day? just curious.
(think that's the only one on your list I've read)

[liv]

Yup, that came from you. It's funny how much I still love Skallagrigg (and I reread The Stonor Eagles from time to time too) even though I can really obviously see the flaws. I just love it.

[desperance]

I've not met him myself. but his sister - the writer Susan Moody - is a friend of mine. Also - and independently, before I met Susan - I too read Skallagrigg, at exactly the right age. At the time he was a bestseller in the UK with his Duncton Wood books, which are just Watership Down rip-offs with moles instead of rabbits; Skallagrigg came from somewhere else entirely

[liv]

Heh, small world, it's cool that you're friends with Horwood's sister. And yes, those awful Duncton Wood books, those are really nothing at all like his adult novels.

[jack]

I am kind of resistant to diversity auditing booklists

I'm a bit torn. I think it's worthwhile to recognise what are my favourite books, rather than lying and making something up. But it's also true that simply by repeating them I'm reinforcing their prominence.

Like, if any time anyone is less than 100% perfect, they get told off, there's little incentive to improve. But if no-one is ever suggested "why don't you read a bit more widely", no-one will ever get less blinkered.

It's also true, I have been attempting to read a bit more widely, not especially out of conviction, but because I've got bored with books that are "and then he brooded for 800 pages, then saved the world and got a trophy-SO who was way out of his league but loved him for no readily apparent reason". But not many of them have made it onto the favourite list yet, partly because that's a slow process, and partly because my comfort zone grows slowly, and things that are very different to what I'm used I unfortunately do find harder to like.

For that matter, I was thinking of books I've read recently which have been touted as diverse, and even then, they've typically been written by middle-class Americans. Eg. God's War was awesome, but IIRC Kameron Hurley did lots of research and had some life experience outside the US, but wasn't herself Muslim.

[liv]

I thought you were pretty gracious in that discussion, myself. I do see the point of encouraging people to read more widely; the truth is that I don't think very many people actually intentionally stick to books by white men, so it can be worthwhile pointing out patterns. I definitely agree that there's an issue of comfort zone grows slowly; if I go and read a bunch of books from a completely different culture and / or genre from what I normally read, I won't have the protocols or experience to get the most out of them. I'm having that trouble with Homestuck at the moment; I have no idea what race the author is, but I'm just not familiar enough with webcomics to really get it. And yes, I'm suspicious of "diversity" if it's middle-class Americans who happen to have a different skin colour, I mean, I don't actively avoid books by Americans of color, but I'm not sure I'm really broadening my reading by seeking them out.

[daharyn]

My overall goddamn point is that we are predisposed to like that which feels familiar. What this ends up doing, on a larger scale, is reinforcing the marginalization of the already marginalized. So it's up to us, if we want to be ethical human beings, not only to try new things--but to actively choose to learn to like new things. If you don't do that, you need to take a step back and think about why.

Too many people say "oh, I like what I like" and never think about why. That's a problem--it contributes to social stratification and misunderstanding in very real ways, in the aggregate. And the only way to mitigate that is to challenge the individual, in the hopes of eventually shifting the whims of the crowd, one person at a time.

But you can be damn sure I'll keep my mouth shut next time!

[liv]

Thanks for this comment, it's appreciated. I'm going to hold off from replying in detail because I am not doing well at communicating with you just now, and I don't want to force unwanted interaction. But I am certainly thinking about what you're saying and I'm grateful for your perspectives on this conversation.