Shaina Reads

After struggling to dig in to anything over the last couple of weeks, I finally caught my stride and devoured the last two-thirds of Nicole Dennis-Benn's Here Comes the Sun. I am so grateful that I sat in on her panel at BEA, because her debut novel is stellar. Here Comes the Sun tackles the struggles of working-class women in Jamaica through the turbulent story of one family, and it should be on everyone's wish list for when it comes out this July.

And now that I've got debut novels on the brain (and on the Kindle—I'm keeping in this vein with Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller), I have started wondering what, if any, relationship I have with first works. Glancing through my Goodreads ratings over the years, there are not any trends that pop out. (This is further complicated by the fact that I am sure I have read books that I didn't know are their authors' first works offhand.) Some have been great, some less so, with my ratings converging on the middle of the road.

I think this ambivalence reflects how I think about debuts as well. Slapping the word "debut" on the marketing copy for a new book can work against it for me. I am particularly wary about requesting review copies of debuts because I don't have any prior experience with the author and cannot investigate any of their earlier work. I will often wait to see reactions from trusted bookish folk and then head to the bookstore or library. On the other hand, knowing that a novel I'm already digging is an author's debut can heighten my enjoyment of it. It can often take a book or two for authors to hone their voices, so writers that shine in their first titles never fail to impress me.

My super-scientific Twitter survey about this topic reveals that you all seem to have mixed feelings about debuts, too! Some of you love them and find yourself hesitating more over second novels (what if it doesn't live up to the first one?), others of you are picky about the types of debuts you seek out, and others among you could not care less if something is an author's first work.

So what's the deal with debuts, then? I suppose all this is to say that there isn't a deal with debuts, at least not for me right now. I do want to devote more time to reading them, and I will be keeping an eye on my thoughts as I read Fuller's novel and work through my BEA stack (also, perhaps unsurprisingly, full of first novels).

In her memoir The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Sarah Schulman dedicates a chapter to the homogenization of art and creation. She specifically discusses how MFA programs can encourage uniformity when they guide their students toward a predetermined set of "influential voices":

One is the homogenization of influences. Students in an MFA program often are exposed to the same ideas and artworks as their classmates. They don't stumble through the world accruing eclectic influences, based on their own aesthetic interests, impulses, and chance. They lose the opportunity to fight to be influenced, to check out weird things and trail after unusual people. This creates homogeneity.

Schulman took on big topics in a slim number of pages—most prominently how the AIDS crisis led to literal and artistic gentrification—and you should definitely read it to learn more about them. It also got me thinking about something smaller and closer to home.

I've only been blogging for a little over a year, and in that time, I've come across a wide variety of bloggers. Genre junkies, free-range readers, folks who only post reviews and others who never post them, people only reading the latest and greatest and others who have zero interest in chasing down ARCs. No matter what you want to read, someone is out there writing about it; if they aren't, it's a cinch to grab a URL and get going on writing it yourself. The reading and writing freedom is astounding and invigorating. Even so, I do think that many bloggers (particularly newer ones) go through a period of thinking they should only be covering the newest, buzziest books on the block.

On the one hand, perhaps this is good—if we're all going to read the same book, what could be better than having a wide variety of opinions on it, rather than a a small handful of authoritative voices coming from above, à la The New York Review of Books? Plus, we have the power to cover far more books than do the big outlets, meaning that overlooked gems are more likely to get their fair share of attention.

On the other, I do wonder if there is a tendency toward creating an echo chamber that discourages bloggers from reading outside of the publishing cycle out of fear that readers won't be interested in hearing about backlist or books off the beaten path. Even if our opinions on it vary, we're still only thinking about and covering a finite amount of source material.

This brings up the elephant in the room, the one Schulman is really getting at above: being "successful" at what we do (in this case, blogging). When we don't believe that the books we want to read or the content we want to create is "interesting enough," we may look toward other "successful" bloggers to guide us in what we should read and how we should write. This isn't necessarily bad—there are lots of excellent, "successful" book blogs out there—but depending too much on them for guidance can perpetuate sameness in what we read and how we write about it.

I'm throwing a lot of different ideas at the wall here, and I'd love to have you all weigh in!

A headline making the rounds on Twitter caught my eye last week: "Australian Parents Angry Over Books in Happy Meals."

You can check out the article from GalleyCat (or the longer piece it cites) for more information, but the gist is this: an Australian children's health advocacy group is angry at McDonald's for its "Happy Readers" promotion. Instead of receiving a toy with a Happy Meal, children are offered a choice of a soft-cover physical book or a code for a digital book via a McDonald's-branded reading app. There are 23 books in total, and parents can opt to buy the books individually at a rate of $2 AUD each.

As someone interested in both early literacy and public health, I've been mulling over the implications of this program since I first saw the article. On the one hand, I believe that putting a book in a child's hand, regardless of the source, is a net positive. Scores of research findings agree with me; in fact, on the very same day that GalleyCat tweeted its piece, the New York Times tweeted one summarizing two recent studies showing how important early reading may be to kids' brain development. If a child is getting a Happy Meal anyway, why not give them a book instead of a possibly vulgar Minions toy?

On the other, I understand why framing the book collection in a "gotta catch 'em all" fashion could entice kids to ask their parents for McDonald's more often or encourage parents to buy it for them more than they otherwise would. While the Golden Arches does offer lighter options these days, not all will order them; considering that rates of childhood obesity have more than doubled in the United States in the past 30 years, it's likely in a child's best interest to limit the number of smiling red boxes in their diets.

Beyond this is where things get hairy for me. Some of the comments on the Herald Sun article suggest that parents buy the Happy Readers books individually or take their children to the library or bookstore instead. While most likely well-intentioned, they miss the fact that not all families have these options. The individual books and books from other stores cost money, and if the choice is between a book (or, like, half a book, if you compare a bookstore paperback to a Happy Meal) and dinner, what's going to win out? At least in this case, when a parent opts for the meal, the child gets the book, too. As for libraries, they may not be conveniently located or, even worse, they may not exist at all.

As for the health aspect of the debate, there's a difference between discussing the physical health ramifications of fast food and lambasting the moral characters of the individuals who eat it, one that gets confused far too often for my taste and, again, reeks of classism. While I didn't notice any particularly egregious comments on either article I linked, I would not be surprised to see them crop up eventually.

Like I said, there's a lot to think about here, and I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter! Feel free to bring up things I didn't touch on here, because there are plenty of 'em.

Have you guys ever regretted one of your book reviews?

I'm not talking about wondering if your gushing, lukewarm or downright bad feelings about a book were wrong because of all the glowing or scathing reviews out there that disagree with you. That's different: it's called impostor syndrome, and it's actually something I've covered before! I'm talking about looking back on old writing and wishing you'd expressed a point differently (or not at all), or learning more about a topic and recognizing the way you thought or felt about a book that dealt with it doesn't jive with how you think or feel now.

An example for me in recent days is my review of Loving Day by Mat Johnson. In a nutshell, Loving Day is the story of a man exploring and coming to terms with his biracial identity through newfound fatherhood and community and old ghosts. Johnson is a skilled and often hilarious writer and I thought his book had some excellent moments, but I found the plot to be, as I wrote, "a little convoluted, at times in ways that took away from the value of [the protagonist] Warren's transformation of identity." I've come to rue those words ever since reading Justina Ireland's Book Riot satirical piece about how to analyze white characters in novels, particularly her sixth point down:

"Were there other issues in the story for the character to deal with besides being white? The book is probably trying to tackle too many issues. Discuss how the character’s white identity was enough issue for the story without the distraction of all of those other annoying subplots." - Justina Ireland, How to Analyze White Characters in Book Reviews (via Book Riot)

While I still do think that there was a lot going on in Loving Day and that one of the story's main themes was how Warren changed over time, I still cringe at how dismissive and shallow that part of my review might sound, especially coming from a white reader.

I've thought about going back to change that sentence, or perhaps even deleting it altogether. I mean, we've all made use of the "delete this Tweet" button, right? With reviews, though, I've always stopped myself. Even if it might save me (real or imagined) embarrassment, it would feel like I was erasing evidence of an instance in which I was less thoughtful with my words or judgment than I should have been. If I were going to change my review of any book, I'd want to go back to the book itself and reread it in its entirety or, at the very least, re-explore some of the passages or plot points that gave me the most pause the first time around.

As voracious readers and prolific writers, I think book bloggers are constantly learning new things and reshaping their viewpoints in wake of them; what we posted a few months (or a few years!) ago might not represent what we think or feel now, but we shouldn't hurry to sweep our old words under the rug. Instead, we should bring them out in the open and explore why they might be inaccurate, troubling, or outdated. After all, the best way to prevent new mistakes is by acknowledging old ones, and that goes for much more than book blogging.

Last month, I shared a post about how the homeless often get short-changed when it comes to accessing resources (books, computers, etc.) at public libraries. I was inspired by a piece by Kelly Jensen over at Book Riot about how an initiative to get free e-books into children's hands is ignoring a significant segment of the population—namely, the poor and/or those without Internet access.

I was surprised and delighted to find out from some commenters that there are libraries out there that do offer services to homeless patrons, and I also learned a little more about the various legal and fiscal roadblocks libraries can run into when they attempt to create lending systems and programming for underprivileged populations (e.g., less accountability for missing materials, resource licensing, and more). I know that policies and programs vary widely by state (and probably even county), and I really appreciated everyone who took the time to weigh in!

Still, there's another aspect to this issue that I can't stop thinking about, and I think it's best summarized by a quotation from the American Library Association's toolkit about how to provide better library services to the homeless and poor. The toolkit quotes Sassafras Lowrey—author of Kicked Out, an anthology that compiles the voices of currently and formerly homeless LGBTQ youth—about what the library can mean to the young and displaced:

“I needed a book about how to live through this more than I needed to know I had somewhere to stay, to know I had a way to get to school or to know what I would have for dinner. I needed a book to prove to me that survival was possible.”—pg. 4, Extending Our Reach: Reducing Homelessness Through Library Engagement

When you're homeless, you often aren't having your basic needs met; the hundreds of calls I fielded during my internship at a homeless hotline made this obvious. Seeking out food and shelter is important, of course, but when your homelessness is chronic, you need pockets of time spent doing things other than surviving.

I think a recent photo set from National Geographic perfectly captures this sentiment. The magazine published a series of portraits by Fritz Hoffman of homeless library patrons reading in libraries throughout the state of California. Some of them are reading to learn; maybe what they learn will be directly applied to improving their situation (i.e., finding steady employment), but many of them are diving into fiction, lighter non-fiction, and religious texts. They're doing what so many of us do on the weekend or after a long day: they're diving into a good book and losing themselves in it.

While I was never homeless as a child, I was more than once displaced. After my parents separated when I was 14, my mother and I got evicted from our new apartment. We spent months sharing a makeshift bed in the living room of my best friend's home, and after her (my best friend's) parents separated as well, all of us (my best friend, our two moms and I) rented a house together so she and I could finish out our junior and senior years of high school. Even before my parents split up, I was dealing daily with substance abuse, verbal and emotional abuse, and chronic depression in my household.

Throughout it all, books were my sanctuary, my lifeline, the places I could escape into (Hogwarts, Constance Billard School for Girls, the "territories" of the Travelers) and have the chaos around me melt away. Sometimes I even dove into bookish chaos (à la Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis) because it was more manageable than my own. I could always shelve the book in a way I couldn't shelve my reality.

I do not mean to fish for pity or to say I've had the hardest childhood in history, but these are the facts. I know what I went through, and I know what helped me endure it. It can be easy to dismiss books as a luxury that the homeless, poor or otherwise struggling wouldn't be able to take advantage of anyway—with all that surviving to do, who has the time?

But everyone should be given the opportunity to do more than just survive.

Kelly Jensen posted a fantastic piece over at Book Riot yesterday that discussed why some well-intentioned initiatives to get kids reading are almost completely useless for children in poverty.

One of her major arguments was that giving children free access to e-books might sound nice on paper, but it's essentially meaningless for that one-third of the population living at or below the poverty line that doesn't go online at all. (Note: These statistics come from adult survey respondents, but I'm willing to bet that children of parents who don't go online don't have significant access to computers themselves. For more about child/teen Internet access, Jensen linked to this Guardian article.)

I almost gave myself whiplash from nodding along to Jensen's points, and it got me thinking about yet another significant segment of the population that gets screwed over when it comes to accessing library resources: the homeless.

During my senior year in college, I interned for the National Runaway Safeline, a crisis hotline for runaway and homeless youth based in Chicago. Over ten months, I spent countless hours on the phone with children and teenagers looking for a place to sleep, a place to eat, or a safe place to get out of the cold. From my training there, I know for a fact that some libraries across the country serve as Safe Places; these are locations where runaway and homeless youth can go to find support and resources, such as information about shelters and food banks. However, I don't know how many of these libraries offer resource (e.g., book/computer) access to the chronically or intermittently homeless. I'd wager the number is pretty low.

While I couldn't find a statistic for this, I do know that every library card I've ever registered for came with a prerequisite; I had to present a piece of mail or some other document that attached my name to a permanent address. While on its face this may seem like a low hurdle to clear, it completely precludes homeless adults and children from accessing library services. (For context: On a given night in January 2013, more than 600,000 people in the United States were homeless, with nearly one-quarter of them children under 18.)

Reflecting on my time at the hotline, talking to kids who had nowhere (or nowhere safe) to sleep at night, I can damned near guarantee that at least a handful those kids would have jumped at the chance to get a library book. The American Library Association released a toolkit for how libraries can better serve homeless individuals; one of the testimonials in particular struck me as I was writing this post. When asked what he would want librarians to know about him, a homeless youth responded:

“And it’s always good to be able to have a safe space to relax and just open a book and just let the words take you. And having a place you can do that safely, without being harassed or attacked or any of that is extremely ideal, and extremely beneficial to the reader and pretty much everyone involved.” —pg. 4, Extending Our Reach: Reducing Homelessness Through Library Engagement

Sometimes these kids—and adults, too—want to do something besides just survive out there; libraries can make this a reality.

I know some of my readers work in libraries, and I'd be especially interested in hearing about this issue from your end. Clearly, I don't understand all the inner workings of libraries. I know why cards matter—accountability for missing materials, calculating collection utilization and other statistics, etc.—but it's also painfully clear that they can be difficult to obtain and, thus, bar some people from accessing library resources. Have you ever had to deal with this, and, if so, what did you do?

And, as always, I welcome thoughts from anyone else who'd like to weigh in!