diversity

On White Guys Talking About Reading Women

http://jezebel.com/damn-youre-not-reading-any-books-by-white-men-this-yea-1751094468

I’m a white guy, and prone to getting unfortunately navel-gazey and introspective. I heard about this piece from Jezebel on the 3% Podcast (books in translation, check it out) and spent some time thinking about how it applied to me and my project of reading 50 books by female authors this year.

Jia Tolentino seems to be calling out the self-aggrandizing kind of “look at how progressive I am for not reading straight white dudes” posts and proclamation, posts and proclamations that tend to shift the focus onto the readers of women, marginalizing them women themselves. I certainly hope I’m not coming across that way -this reading project was born out of the unpleasant realization that my own reading habits had been skewing excessively toward male authors, and the realization that institutional pressures had been pushing me that way. An active choice seemed necessary to rectify that. But this isn’t an example of Hetero-CIS-white-male-me championing The Other. I felt fucking embarrassed by the lack of diversity in my 2015 reading, and I set some concrete guidelines for myself. This isn’t a “year of reading women” or anything like that -it’s part of a transition into a more balanced reading life, one that includes more poetry, more works in translation, and more nonfiction, as well as less gender bias.

I want to read things outside of my own personal experience. This is one of the pleasures of reading. But I don’t want to come across as a self-righteous ass about my reading choices. The reason I’m being public about my reading is that, in the process of keeping a public reading log, I became aware of the rather insidious preponderance of 20th century straight white American male authors whose books I selected when left to my own devices. I honestly didn’t realize how bad it was, and would have self-reported my reading habits to have been far more diverse than they actually were. My goal in sharing this realization was not self-aggrandizement, but an admission of failure, and a call for self-examination. It’s too damn easy to lie to yourself about this shit.

http://jezebel.com/damn-youre-not-reading-any-books-by-white-men-this-yea-1751094468

A River Runs Through It and USFS 1919

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I read these two novellas back-to-back, in an anthology that also featured the wonderfully named short story “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’”. A River Runs Through It is far and away Maclean’s best-known work, and deservedly so. Maclean is a master at opening up the interior lives of strong, silent men, self-reliant individualists whose communication with the ones they love (or hate) all happens beneath the level of language. A River Runs Through It is the perfection of this revelation, a powerful story about family, nature, and the fellowship of men. The prose is beautiful and studied, the work of a man with a lifetime of reading and experience behind him. The story moves along like the kind of fishing it depicts, smooth and languid, even in moments of great tension and resolution. The last paragraph is one of the greatest closers in 20th century literature.

USFS 1919 is a great read, but it lacks the emotional resonance and sense of importance in Maclean’s more famous work. The plot is compelling, but moves forward at a stilted pace, sometimes feeling drawn out and other times rushing through. The relationships here are undefined and unimportant, taking a backseat to an admittedly good story about the adventures of a young boy coming into his own identity working among men.

This is the part where I get all angsty-white-guy. I love A River Runs Through It. I’m gonna try to get my dad to read it (he worked in Montana as a lumberjack, we used to fish together, etc.) I’m gonna read it again. It isn’t my world (I grew up in Southern California playing lead guitar in metal/post-hardcore bands) but it’s a world I’m familiar with, that I’ve looked into and visited on more than one occasion. This shit resonates with me. Should I feel guilty about that? Am I robbing myself of the diversity of human experience by reading books by and about White, heterosexual North American males and their identity as such, a subject I’m already pretty familiar with out of my own biography? Or is reading Maclean and Carver (and Johns Steinbeck, Gardner and Updike, John is a white-guy name) something I can appreciate on a deeper level, as it’s something that comes out of my own experience to a degree that other work doesn’t? I’m still feeling some lingering guilt over the fact that half of the books I read last year were written by straight, White American men. I don’t have an answer here; I’m honestly trying to figure things out.

Recommendation (regarding the book, not free-floating First-world angst): definitely read A River Runs Through It, and keep going if you dig it.