two houses, both alike in driving me crazy

"classics vs YA" you ask? shut up I'll kill you

My book comes out in three months, so naturally I am thinking about all the points I wish I’d made in the book, or at least hit harder. Large parts of Dangerous Fictions are about book bans and fascists, and I make a lot of jokes about those losers and how they don’t even read (or, in the case of fascists, approach all art as algorithmic proof of what they already believe, so they might as well not read, since they’ve already decided if a given work is beautiful patriotic propaganda or sinister sneaky propaganda.) But I do also spend part of the book talking about taste, since my subject is whether fiction is “dangerous,” and conversations about taste are often inextricable from conversations about the potential evils or benefits of fiction. Are bad books bad for you, and good books good for you? Is it wrong to promote reading the classics with all their dead white male cultural baggage, or is it much wronger to promote the reading of “junky” genre fiction like YA, with its aesthetic poverty and lack of substance? I think the question is complicated, and in the book I tried to approach it in a nuanced way. But what I partly left out is how absolutely fucking annoying everybody involved in this conversation tends to be, especially online, which is often enough where the discussion happens even though social media is physically designed for irritating dead-end arguments, and I’m not quite sure what we all expect to find there.

Online is, however, a great space for non-readers: for people who use text essentially as an algorithmic sorting device. Non-readers and advertising bots are virtually identical in that they treat every post as evidence that the poster is reducible to a set of predetermined microniche marketing categories. When it comes to this particular perennial internet argument over reading classics vs reading “junk” fiction, these marketing categories tend to be Lit Bro and YA Scold. You will notice immediately that these categories are gendered, regardless of the actual gender of the participants. You may also notice—depending on your degree of internet brain poisoning—that they are also basically not real, or not real in their platonic forms. These are only imaginary Types of Guy/Girl. Some people make arguments that are associated with these broad stereotypical categories, but these categories aren’t, and can never be, the whole of anyone’s being.

Nevertheless, these categories aren’t wholly imaginary, in that there are a set of arguments that get made, and people who make them, and people who see themselves essentially fighting for one side or the other. Nobody sees themselves as a Lit Bro or a YA Scold of course; it’s only ever the Heroic Defenders of Truth versus the YA Scolds, or the slightly different Heroic Defenders of Truth against the Lit Bros.

Which side am I on? Neither. This actually led to a minor conflict with my book editors, who were worried that, except for being anti-book banners and anti-fascist, I was insufficiently dedicated in the book to picking sides, especially over matters of taste. But when it comes to this particular argument, I’m not interested in picking sides. I hate all of you equally. I have in fact heard both sides, and they suck.

The book banners take the proud position of not reading: so do the nonreaders who refuse to read each other as full human beings online, and also refuse to read the books they’re so mad about. A person who claims that the classics are all boring dead white men (or that literary fiction is primarily composed of professors lusting after co-eds) is a person who has not simply not read much of what they’re talking about, or not read much in a while. A person who thinks that everything marketed under the banner of YA or commercial genre fiction is equally bad and unworthy (exceptions always made for the commercial genre fiction this person likes, usually several decades old) is also a person who has not read much in the contemporary genres they are so sure are terrible. It is true that classic literature tends to be classic for a reason, and “the canon” (which is imperfectly defined, constantly in flux, and only recently diversified) contains a much higher proportion of well-written books than in any contemporary genre. But great new books are written all the time. It’s just a bit more effort to sift through and find them, especially in genres outside literary fiction which (supposedly) don’t prioritize prose.¹ There is in fact such a thing as a great YA novel. Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver and Julie C. Dao’s Forest of a Thousand Lanterns are both YA novels and extremely good. I happen to know this, because I have read them. 

Personally, I seek out good books to read because I like them. I think most people who read—enough to get mad about other people’s reading at least—also basically like books. But they are often scared of them—or more specifically, they are scared of their own ignorance. The more you read, the more there is to read. The well doesn’t dry up. It only gets deeper. You read one book, and learn about more books you didn’t know about, and more, and then more books are coming out every year, and people are talking about them and you can’t keep up. Whichever side you’re on here, whichever Heroic Truth you’re defending, the more embarrassing truth is that you have FOMO. And a quick way to manage FOMO is to say, “actually, i’m not missing out, because this whole huge genre of thing is terrible, and in fact I’m a morally/intellectually better person for avoiding it altogether.”

If you’re a YA Scold—sorry, I mean a Heroic Defender of Truth against the Lit Bros—it’s possible that you avoid classics because you don’t enjoy realism, and a lot of that stuff is realism (though hardly all, which again you would know if you tried it). But setting aside the question of basic subject preference, what you are never doing by refusing to read classic literature is making a heroic blow against cis white male supremacy. You are only depriving yourself of art that belongs to you by right as a human being, a lot of which was not written by dead cis white men, and has stuck around for reasons far beyond bigoted syllabi. Even when it comes to the dead white guys, you have not showed Nabokov what’s what by refusing to read Lolita. You have just not read Lolita. And of course you don’t have to read Lolita specifically if it doesn’t sound like your sort of thing, but undoubtedly there is something that is your sort of thing, and by loudly choosing not to read you are only punching yourself in the face.

But then again, there are reasons that people avoid classic literature or literary fiction, and often enough it’s because at some point in their lives, “high” literature was weaponized against them to make them feel bad. Maybe they read a book and didn’t get it immediately,and this wasn’t treated as a beautiful state of curiosity and a chance to learn but an opportunity for humiliation. Maybe the classics presented to them in high school and college really were all or mostly dead white guys—changes to the canon have been recent and sporadic—and maybe they were instructed to revere these men as dead names rather than enjoy their living work. With names comes namedropping, and the feeling of stupidity for not being familiar with these names, so it can be a lot easier to pretend that there’s nothing here worth the familiarity, and that it’s all dull bigoted overwritten nonsense anyway. Better to stick to simply-written novels in familiar genres, about which one would always have to be on the defensive against the snobs, but would never be caught striving for something out of reach.

If you happen to be someone who actually enjoys classic literature and wants other people to read it, then the absolute worst thing you can do is act like a snob and put other readers on the defensive. Being an asshole to other people about their low tastes does not encourage them to try new things: it only bolsters the impression that “high” literature is the province of the snobs who are assholes to people about their low taste. It does not help. In fact I think it’s deliberately designed to hurt. Snobbery is an outward-focused sensibility: it requires a crowd of uneducated dumb-dumbs to look down upon. The people in the Lit Bro camp—sorry, the Heroic Defenders of Truth against the YA Scolds—need the YA scolds as a matter of identity formation. High culture requires a low culture to project itself against, not in order to demonstrate that one book is a better aesthetic object than another book (an argument that has nothing to do with whether a book has been classed as “high” or “low”, but whether a given reader can consider themselves better (intellectually, spiritually) than another, for having done certain kinds of reading and not others, for being familiar with a comfortably established list of names.

I do specifically state in Dangerous Fictions that I think snobbery is the original sin here: people would not give up on “high” culture unless at some point they were directly or subtly warned off. This often happens, I expect, at a formative time like a high school English class.² Whether overtly or implicitly, the classics are often presented to young readers as a formidable mountain that one must climb for proper soul-making, and only the unworthy would struggle. This is pure Protestant Nonsense(TM), something I do cover in the book in some detail; it’s also largely again about identity formation, a method of cordoning off literature as the province of special people alone.

It may come as a blow to some of you, but reading a great novel or many great novels does not make you interesting or special. The thing about reading fiction is that anybody literate can do it. It is an inherently democratic act, which is why it belongs to everybody. “Oh,” you may think, “but I’ve read many great novels, I’ve cultivated my mind.” Binch try cultivating a personality and some individual taste. You are not merely the sum total of the art you have consumed, and nobody else is either. Everyone is much more interesting and complicated than that. This is again something you would probably know, if you actually read books.

One of the best things about reading these days is that many books are available for free at your local public library. They are still there and quite accessible (though they probably need your support against book banners and budget-cutters alike). You can read anything you want and it’s unlikely that anybody is actively judging you for your reading: nobody but yourself, and your bad memories and your private status insecurities. Whatever your personal taste may be, no one is actually going door to door making you read—or watch or listen—anything you don’t want to.

No one, that is, except for me. Read Middlemarch. Read Spinning Silver. I will not stop yelling about this until you do.³

1. Let’s be real: a decent amount of literary fiction is written in sentences that resemble good prose, that have the cadence of good prose, but are not good prose.

2. I agree that people should learn to let go of their traumatic high school experiences. Let’s all work on it together.

3. Get off your lawn? This is PUBLIC PROPER— *I am dragged away kicking and screaming*