Paris Review editor-in-chief Lorin Stein entered the Franzenfreude fracas early on, with a piece on the Atlantic’s Web site arguing that Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult’s call for critics to “spend more time celebrating mass-market novels” was a kind of “fake populism” that “pretends to speak for women (as if women weren't the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men).” Weiner responded by guffawing at Stein’s taste for “made-to-measure Lord Willys shirts,” charcuterie, and Calvados.

That’s the backdrop against which I read Stein’s recent post on the Paris Review’s (gorgeous) new Web site, in which he responds to a reader who asks: “Which books would you recommend to a smart, bored, somewhat alienated teenage girl trapped in the suburbs?” Stein’s put together an appealing list—though, as a former smart (or so I thought!) suburban teenager, Against Interpretation seems like an eyebrow-raising choice for a 16-year-old, even one cast in the Daria mold. (For those who are counting along at home, Stein name-checks five male authors and three females—and he’s sort of sheepish about recommending Donna Tart’s The Secret History.)

What do you think of Stein’s choices—or his picks, in response to another reader’s question, for “philosophical fiction by women”? (OK, I'm finally ordering my copy of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, now that I'm convinced it's not a novelization of that Tom Cruise movie.)

What would be on your list?

Tags: books, Daria, franzenfreude, Jennifer Weiner, jodi picoult, literature, lorin stein, teenagers

I dunno, Amanda, if the anecdotal "men get to the remote control first" really cuts it here, or explains much about why women read more books. Your point that boys grow up reading less probably has more to it, given what we know about how boys and girls tend to learn. But I took a different lesson from Laura Miller's point that women, not men, usually are the ones at the table making the book deal. Publishing, she writes, "has come to look a lot like a skilled, pink-collar ghetto, albeit garnished with a thin dusting of reflected glamor." The key word is pink-collar, because once a profession flips to being female-dominated, the historical rule of thumb is that it doesn't flip back. Teachers, secretaries, and nurses are all mostly women, and it's been that way for decades. I don't think men are flocking back to them, recession or no recession. If book editing goes the same way, then yes, at the margins, more books that appeal to women will be published. But it's hard to imagine men won't have plenty to choose from, too. The free market should be good for that, at least.

Tags: books, laura miller, reading

Another day, another round of asking the question, "Why don't men read more books?" As usual, women are held up as the culprits when these sorts of questions are asked. Even though everyone genteelly refuses to blame women—instead choosing to honor their accomplishments and acknowledge how sexism shapes behavior—the answer persistently comes back to, "Because women dictate publishing and therefore women's tastes dominate." But the answer doesn't quite satisfy, and I think it's because people are asking the wrong question. The right question is, "Why do women read so many books?"

The reasons that people of both genders don't read as much as they used to are just so obvious! Back when people read more, they didn't have cable television, laptop computers, or a God-only-knows-how-profitable video-gaming industry to entertain them. The existence of ESPN and video games alone should explain why men don't read more. But I think they also explain why women also keep on reading while men are giving up on the hobby. Not so much in my feminist household, but in many I've seen, men simply get first dibs on the TV, leaving women with the option of staring at walls, doing some more chores, or reading. Especially if they don't play the game or enjoy the show that's on.

Plus, reading fits the socialization patterns of women more than men. Boys are brought up from a young age not only to believe that reading is for sissies, but also that their desires and entertainments can be obtrusive and uninterrupted. Girls are brought up to be bookworms, and, in part, it's because it's a quiet past-time. The stigma attached to reading falls away for men as they grow up, but they don't stop feeling entitled to entertainment that is loud and engrossing enough that it can't simply be dropped because a chore has to be done or a family member needs attention.

Women, on the other hand, are still under a lot of pressure not to be in anyone's way and to be easy to interrupt. If a child is whining, a phone starts ringing, or your husband has something he needs to tell you right now, a book can be dropped, whereas you might lose the game if you drop the video-game controller. In fact, I've wondered from a small age if there's just something about a female person holding a book that compels people to interrupt. The desire for uninterrupted reading caused me to learn how to work the bathroom locks at a young age. As an adult who wished to read uninterrupted by men in public, I perfected my icy scowl and cold shoulder.

Tags: feminism, video games, women reading

A couple of days ago the New York Times' sports section reported on the fascinating saga of Dorothy Jane Mills, who, for several decades beginning around 1950, assisted her husband, the historian Harold Seymour, in writing a three-volume scholarly history of baseball. More than assisted: She co-wrote it, but received little recognition at the time and, it would seem, precious little thanks from her husband.

Seymour, according to the Times, initially was Mills' American history professor; as his student she typed up his lectures, got in the habit of critiquing them, fell in love, married him, and helped research his dissertation. According to the Times' account, when Oxford University Press arranged to publish it, Mills "conducted research, devised outlines and rewrote sections" but "kept quiet when she received no credit on the cover and barely even in the acknowledgments in the first volume and its sequel, published in 1972."

By the third book, Seymour was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and so Mills wrote most of it. When she asked her husband (whom she always addressed by his last name) for co-author credit, she says, he refused. Asked why she didn't go ahead and put her name on the cover, she said, "I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t change things. No. He felt they were his books. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t alter that.”

Seymour is now dead, and Mills—who remarried, continued writing under her own byline, and, at 81, is working on a novel—continued to resent her lack of credit. She began talking and writing about her contributions after he died, and subsequent reporters confirmed the work she did. This month, when the Society for American Baseball Research chose to honor Seymour and his series with an award, she fumed and so, apparently, did female members of SABR. After a bit of a kerfluffle, she, too, was honored. “ 'Everyone assumed that he had done all that work by himself—that’s what he wanted them to assume, but we were equal partners,' ” Mills is quoted saying. “'He just couldn’t share credit. And I didn’t say anything at the time, because at the time, wives just didn’t do that.' ”

The Times suggests that what may have been going on was "intellectual spousal abuse," an interesting concept and one I had not heard of before. The term introduces the possibility that even when a wife—or, I guess, a husband—agrees to contribute work to a spouse's project and have it go uncredited, it may not be truly consensual. Or wasn't, back then. Her speaking up after the fact reminds me of situations in which a woman goes public about alleged sexual harassment that occurred in the past. I have always thought the dynamics of those situations easy to understand. There are lots of factors that can mitigate against speaking up at the time, but at a certain point—often when the alleged harasser is about to get a major promotion involving public glory, supervision of lots more women, or, say, a major judgeship—it becomes harder to stay quiet.

More to the point, reading the piece, I also thought of recent instances where a wife contributes significantly to work published under her husband's byline. A year or so again there was much discussion of the fact that writer Dan Baum acknowledged that his wife, Margaret Knox, does a great deal of editing and organizing on his bylined work. We blogged about it, and the American Prospect published a thoughtful post that received a number of comments including some suggesting that whatever consenting adult writers consent to is their business. Others found the arrangement troubling, given the history of women typing their husbands' theses and not getting credit. More recently, Jezebel meditated on a profile of Paul Krugman that shows his wife, the economist Robin Wells, has done a fair amount of editing of his work. Jezebel writes that "it's hard not to see their relationship in the context of a larger pattern of famous male writers and their devoted, semi-invisible wives."

Marriage is such a complex arrangement, involving competition, support, synergy, compromise, cheerleading, constructive criticism, unconstructive criticism, etc. How much help is OK? How much uncredited help is OK? If you'd credit a research assistant, shouldn't you credit a spouse? How do we think about these things in the era of companionate marriage and wives with degrees and accomplishments? If the husband cheerfully acknowledges the help—as Seymour clearly did not, back then—is it OK? If the wife is OK with providing the help uncredited—as Mills, apparently, really wasn't, even back then—is it OK? The Mills case is a useful reminder that what a person agrees to at the time sometimes rankles, later, under altered circumstances. But then, that's true of many things in marriage. One wonders if spousal co-writing will ever factor into a divorce settlement and if so, how that will be untangled.

Then again, in this case technology, or maybe just technological glitches, can also mete out a peculiar justice: Looking for Seymour's books on Amazon, I noted that Mills (who also wrote under the name Dorothy Z. Seymour) is credited as an author in the blurbs advertising the paperback versions of the baseball history (though her name is not on the cover, as far as I can tell). And in some cases, thanks to computer truncating or something, Dorothy Seymour is named in the blurb as the sole author of the book. So, at least in that way, she gets the last laugh.

Tags: books, Dan Baum, Dorothy Jane Mills, Harold Seymour, spouses, wives, writing

KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium, I would argue: To me, sexual language is more subjective than sexual images are. At least those on TV. And how would such a rating system work? I, for one, would far rather the preteens and teens I know read a graphic sex scene, sensitively rendered, in a book whose values seemed humanist and complex, than have them read a PG version of such a scene in a trashy “teen” book about high school cliques.

As you point out, reading about a “manpole” is very different than seeing it—reading is, in our world, private, not public. It gives you time to process and think. Then again, the dialogue in the book Buchsbaum mentions, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, sounds kinda … terrible. I've got it: Don’t rate books, just stop publishing trashy YA dramas and hand teenagers real literature instead. Or do I just sound like a literary reactionary—a kind of “Lit,”per Gore—when I say that?

Tags: books, ratings

KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium, I would argue: To me, sexual language is more subjective than sexual images are. At least those on TV. And how would such a rating system work? I, for one, would far rather the preteens and teens I know read a graphic sex scene, sensitively rendered, in a book whose values seemed humanist and complex, than have them read a PG version of such a scene in a trashy “teen” book about high school cliques.

As you point out, reading about a “manpole” is very different than seeing it—reading is, in our world, private, not public. It gives you time to process and think. Then again, the dialogue in the book Buchsbaum mentions, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, sounds kinda … terrible. I've got it: Don’t rate books, just stop publishing trashy YA dramas and hand teenagers real literature instead. Or do I just sound like a literary reactionary—a kind of “Lit,”per Gore—when I say that?

Tags: books, ratings

By way of the NYT's book blog comes this question from January magazine: Should kids' books be rated? Novelist Tony Buchsbaum was reading a review copy of a new YA novel, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, containing this riveting IM exchange:

boundbydad: thrust your fierce quivering manpole at me, stud

grayscale: your dastardly appendage engorges me with hellfire

boundbydad: my search party is creeping into your no man’s land

grayscale: baste me like a thanksgiving turkey!!!

Buchsbaum doesn't give any context for it, so I don't know if it's crude joking or a strikingly unsexy example of IM sex. What I do know is that he doesn't want his 14-year-old son reading it—or, at least, reading it without him knowing that the book was chock full of such language. Apparently it's a comic novel—not something that you'd immediately assume required the kind of adult supervision of, say, an after-school special on incest. So I can see his concern, and I can understand the knee-jerk reaction: If my kid is reading this, I want to know about it! But I think he's wrong. For one thing, I agree with the publisher's defense of the language—I suspect kids 14-and-up do "use this sort of language all the time." To me, it's just the kind of mocking, crass-but-kinda-creative talk a teenager might throw around, both to show he's cool and he "gets it," and just to take some of the shock value of this sort of thing and seize it for his own. As it happens, I just connected (thanks, Facebook) with some of the rudest, crudest teenage boys a girl ever had the privilege to know from my own youth, and this is just the kind of stuff they tossed around back then.

More importantly, this language, this attitude, this content, if you will—it's out there. Buchsbaum compares rating books to rating TV shows or movies, but I'd argue that the same content, in those contexts, is far more powerful. There's a big difference in reading about that "quivering manpole" alone and figuring it out and, as a teen, coming to terms with how you feel about the manpole, the word manpole, and its very quivering, and seeing it on the screen in a room full of parents or peers. That's why books are special, and that's why they should never be rated or censored. A book is the best way to come across something scary, shocking, or just new, and learn how to handle it yourself.

Tags: books, ratings

A New Year's gift from Scholastic! The publisher is bringing back The Babysitters Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial young girls that more or less taught me how to read. Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the 213-title series—you read that right: 213—as well as a prequel. (Outdated references to things like perms and cassette players have been tweaked for the new millennium.)

I, for one, was shocked to learn that all the books are out of print. 'Tis a travesty that demands rectification! (While you're waiting for the re-launch, you can enjoy the comic book adaptations by Raina Telgemeier.)

The which-Babysitter-were-you game was like a preteen version of the which-Sex and the City-character-are-you parlor game. I like to think I was a Kristy with a Claudia rising: bossy, but more into art than sports. And here I'd like to give a shout-out to Ann M. Martin*—how I love seeing that name in print again!—for having such a great, original Asian-American character like Claudia. Did you sob when Mimi died? I still get choked up thinking about it.

Which one were you?

*Correction, December 31, 2009: Ann M. Martin's name was originally spelled incorrectly.

Tags: anne m. martin, babysitters club, books, reading, scholastic

When I first read this item at Jezebel about a book called Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid getting made into a sitcom pilot, I'll confess that it didn't quite register what they were saying. On some level, I assumed that the title they gave was some hyperbolic satire of the title of the actual book, and that the actual book must have a slightly more sane-sounding title. But then I clicked the link and discovered that no, it was in fact possible that a book titled Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid was not only published, but popular enough to get a sitcom pilot.

To make things even worse, it appears that this book is a self-help manual, and not even a work of fiction or maybe even comedy, the natural narratives for sitcom development. (Though it does try---and from what I could tell from the excerpt linked, fails---to be funny.) This makes it at least the second self-help manual out there to be turned into narrative fiction, the first being the ill-advised movie version of He's Just Not That Into You.

Reading this excerpt provided, the immediate question that pops into my mind is, well, "I need an antacid to deal with this." But after that, I had to ask why so many people get pleasure out of pushing this view of men as morons and women as shrews. It's a completely nonsensical view of gender relations, for a simple reason: If men and women are really as awful as they imply, then why bother giving advice on how to cope with it and live together? Wouldn't it be more sensible---if our differences are so intractable that nothing but a lifelong battle of daily struggle will make them survivable---just to go our separate ways? We could still have sex, you know. It's still legal to sleep with someone you aren't married to or living with. Books like these have a big hole in their premise. They argue that men and women are completely opposite, that they're natural enemies, and that they need to struggle to live together, but they never explain why. It can't be that it's that we've always done it that way. We've been able to stop washing our clothes by hand and crapping in the bushes, so surely we could stop living together, if it's that miserable. It's certainly a better solution than making really awful sitcoms as a coping mechanism.

Not that I'm saying that men and women shouldn't live together. I have my argument for why I, as a straight woman, should live with a man: Because actually, I like him. I don't think he's stupid, and I'm not being driven mad slowly through hatred for his maleness. Of course, he's not one to pretend that he's biologically incapable of treating women like they're human beings. Not hating someone makes it much easier to justify living with them.

Like all books of this sort, the ideological agenda of arguing that sexism is here to stay is never far from the surface. I quote:

But modern male stupidity as it applies specifically to women is far more interesting and relevant to our purposes. It actually has its roots in the playgrounds of our youth. It was there that we first became aware of girls. It was also there that we first realized that we liked these strange creatures. They made us feel funny. But good funny. A kind of warm and gushy funny. Of course in those early years it wasn't acceptable to talk about these new feelings with our peers for fear we'd get rightly harangued about the dangers of cooties. But still, we wanted this five-year-old ponytailed goddess to know that we had a thing for her. So what did we do?

 

Or pushed her into the mud and laughed at her. (I'm so sorry, Susan Freyberg.)

And here our stupidity begins.

But how could it be any other way? We never had a chance. The hit and the shove (and once again, I apologize, Susie) were the only ways we knew to express ourselves! They were our way of saying, "Hey, I know it's not cool for us to be hanging out 'cause of the whole cooties thing, but I dig you."

I don't disagree that a lot of male mistreatment of women is due to the struggle between their desires for women and their absorption of the belief that women are inferiors with disgusting bodies, but what caught my eyes was the idea that it has to be this way. Why do men have to loathe women? Why do boys have to loath girls? Wouldn't it be easier if they just liked them? Or is it because the authors are suggesting that girls really do have cooties, and therefore male disgust is inevitable? I'm guessing yes, which is why their whole act about blaming men first for this state of affairs is so disingenuous.

Tags: self-help books, sitcoms

A review from DoubleX guest writer Adrienne M. Davich:

Kent Meyers’ Twisted Tree must be one of the most beautiful and unsettling novels of 2009. Meyers’ novel, set in and around the small town of Twisted Tree, S.D., opens with a horrifying drive: I-90 killer Alexander Stoughton has Hayley Jo Zimmerman in his passenger seat. He has chosen Hayley Jo, like girls before her, because of her anorexia, and now he’s racing down the highway making conversation and delighting at the drive before the murder. His “Anas” are all the same; they all have blind faith when they step into his car, but then, “It’s never joy and welcome when the Anas realize who he is, never happiness that here at last is their friend.” Anyone could mistakenly trust the wrong person, but anorexics, to Stoughton’s mind, are predictably gullible, the most easily ensnared.

The opening chapter of Twisted Tree is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. Alexander Stoughton, like McCarthy’s rapist and child-killer Lester Ballard, lives outside the moral universe. But whereas Ballard is spontaneous and physically and mentally ravaged, Stoughton is a meticulous planner. He appears unthreatening until he has his Ana trapped in his big blue Continental. This is a horrifying premise for a novel, but it moves beyond the voyeuristic in chapters that take us into the lives of townspeople who are affected by the loss of Hayley Jo. Ultimately, Meyers offers not a nihilistic vision, but a window into human endurance, faith, and the longing to be unburdened of a traumatic past.

Among the more striking characters in Twisted Tree is Hayley Jo’s father, Stanley Zimmerman, who turns his attention to his herd of buffalo and his land, in part to stave off the guilt he feels at having failed to protect his daughter. Stanley, quite heroically, endures his loss by becoming more vigilant. The process of finding peace is disordered and painful, but the hurt, as Meyers depicts it, is not just about loss or shame or loneliness. It’s about finding out that what you’ve believed isn’t so, and reaching for cathartic solutions, ways to explain violence and salve the pain, when none exist. It’s about seeking solace after trauma—and very often, self-forgiveness and love.

Tags: anorexia, book of the week, child of god, cormac mccarthy, kent meyers, twisted tree