David James Poissant takes on Alexis Kleinman and book shaming.
—
Spend time online, and you’re liable to run into lists. Lists are in. People love lists. Why not? Lists are quick. They’re easy. They’re a great way to dispense with a bunch of information quickly. Top honeymoon destinations? Put ‘em in a list. Best home remedies for the common cold? List ‘em, quick. Sure, they lack nuance and, all depth whatsoever, but they can be informative, and they’re great conversation starters.
Take Facebook. You can’t spend five minutes on Facebook these days without scrolling through someone’s list of something, and, this month, that something is books. You’ve seen the prompt: “List ten books that have stayed with you. Do this quickly and don’t censor yourself.” Or: “List ten books that have changed your thinking.” Or: “List ten books that have changed your life.”
While some find the challenge obnoxious or pretentious, most people on Facebook are chiming in. The phenomenon has gotten so big, in fact, that Facebook recently analyzed over 130,000 such posts (no data yet on just how many people have participated worldwide) to see which titles pop up again and again. No real surprises. Harry Potter reigns supreme, followed by To Kill a Mockingbird. Other usual suspects in the top twenty include The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, 1984, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. In short, a pretty good cross-section of the books people love: popular and literary fiction, children’s and adult literature, realism and fantasy. For the full list, see here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/the-100-books-that-facebook-users-love/379797/
There is a lot to love about this democratic list. First, it proves that in an age when some decry the end of reading, the “classics” are here to stay. Those formative books we read in high school (#9: The Catcher in the Rye) really do stick with us. Second, while so many reading lists tend to be dominated by male writers, exactly half of the writers here are women. And, third, there are some challenging works here (#17: Margaret Atwood’s dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale, for example), which maybe goes to show that the books readers love aren’t just beach reads, but long and difficult books too.
It’s those books that Huffington Post Tech Editor Alexis Kleinman has a problem with. Or, if not with the books, then Kleinman has a problem with the people who list those books on their Facebook pages. Or, given the Facebook statistics, maybe Kleinman just has a problem with the average reader. Truthfully, I’m not sure what Kleinman has a problem with, but, given her September 5th Huffington Post article “Stop Lying About Your Favorite Books on Facebook,” Kleinman clearly has a problem with someone and is looking for a fight.
I shouldn’t take the hate-bait, and, usually, with these kinds of things, I don’t. But this piece struck a nerve, and not just with me. In less than a week, Kleinman’s article has garnered 47,000 likes on Facebook and thousands of shares, but not the backlash I’d anticipated.
The gist of Kleinman’s short piece, which you can read here [Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexis-kleinman/stop-lying-about-your-fav_b_5772168.html], is that most people are lying on Facebook about the books they say they’ve read. If they’ve read the books they say they’ve read, those books certainly aren’t their favorites. Kleinman does her best to sidestep certain arguments by conflating life-changing books with “favorite books,” which she claims the lists are “really…meant to be.” But, even if we take the argument on Kleinman’s terms, hers is a curious diatribe against reading, what one of my students aptly called “book-shaming.”
To make her point, Kleinman gives an example of a “preposterous” book list. I wish I could say that, of all the Facebook posts, she’d picked mine, but, alas, I’ve only read five of her preposterous ten. Still, the list, which contains titles like William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, doesn’t surprise me. Why wouldn’t someone who loves Hemingway also love Faulkner? They’re both modernists, both writing at the same time, if very differently. And why is it so hard for Kleinman to believe that this particular reader has read and finished Infinite Jest? (Full disclosure: I’ve finished and loved three of Wallace’s books, but Jest I stalled out on a quarter of the way through.) That book has sold over 200,000 copies. Even if half of those copies have gone unread or unfinished, that’s a lot of reads since the book’s publication eighteen short years ago. Not to mention the fact that Wallace is actually a lot more accessible, and a lot funnier, than most people give him credit for. (I began with his second story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and it’s a great place to start.)
Kleinman argues that lists full of long, literary novels like Faulkner’s and Wallace’s are “just one humblebrag after another,” going so far as to accuse people of scouring the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list for titles. “You’re just trying to make yourself feel smarter and make everyone else feel dumb,” Kleinman writes.
But, I beg you, is it really that hard for Kleinman to believe that a number of readers enjoy long, so-called “challenging” books, books like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (#5 on Kleinman’s “preposterous” book list)? That many of us even find such books truly inspiring and fun, because a challenging book, like the toughest Sudoku puzzle or, for athletes, a triathlon, can be fun? After all, we don’t sit on the sidelines at marathons and jeer at the runners: “Liars! You’d rather be watching TV!”
Kleinman asserts that “this is real life,” giving an imaginary list meant to represent the favorite books lurking somewhere in our secret, reading hearts:
- Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone
- Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
- Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
- The Phantom Tollbooth
- The Hunger Games
- Fifty Shades Of Grey
- Gossip Girl
- A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One
- The Lord Of The Rings
- Where The Sidewalk Ends
(Of the ten here, only Harry Potter and The Hunger Games actually made Facebook’s top twenty aggregate.) This list, from which I’ve read three, bums me out for multiple reasons.
First, the bulk of this list is children’s and young adult fiction. There’s a great case to be made for children’s books being the books that stay with us, that shape us, that remain our favorites. But, were that the case Kleinman was trying to make, why no picture books, or Where the Wild Things Are or Goodnight Moon? Why is almost everything on this list what you’d likely encounter in elementary and middle school? Is it so hard for Kleinman to believe that we love children’s literature, we do, but that, for many of us, love doesn’t stop with Harry Potter? That we keep going? That we don’t, in fact, read to “feel smarter,” but to learn a few things about empathy and humanity and, as Atticus puts it in To Kill a Mockingbird, to climb into a person’s “skin and walk around in it?”
Second, the imagined “real life” list is disingenuous. It has to be. I kind of doubt that Kleinman, who studied English Literature at Princeton, secretly adores Gossip Girl, or that, for something erotic, she’d turn to E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey) before she’d open a book by D.H. Lawrence or Anais Nin. I don’t know Kleinman, but I find it hard to imagine that anyone who studied literature at the college level for four years wouldn’t have fallen in love with at least a few “preposterous” books along the way. And, if I had to guess, I’d guess that Kleinman’s personal list would be far closer to the “preposterous” than the “real.”
Third, there’s a reason that so many of the books that show up on people’s Facebook feeds are books read in high school. It’s because many of those books are, in fact, the books that stay with us, that changed our thinking. The book that grabbed me was The Great Gatsby. The only thing I’d read until eleventh grade was comic books. There’s nothing wrong with comic books. But, reading Gatsby, my little sixteen-year-old mind was blown. I was suddenly exposed to a world far less black and white than the one for which the X-men had prepared me. We’re talking way more than fifty shades of grey in Gatsby. It wasn’t long before the X-men lost some of their appeal for me. Why? Because I was, suddenly, growing up. Because I was suddenly more interested in how the world actually works than I was in how cool it would be to shoot lasers out of my eyeballs alongside scantily clad female teammates. Escapism is fun, but learning and growing and embracing life’s myriad complexities and psychological realities can be fun too.
“There is nothing wrong with liking popular books,” Kleinman writes, not seeming to notice that One Hundred Years of Solitude (#2 on her “preposterous” list) has, according to the Ottawa Citizen, now sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. If this doesn’t prove Marquez popular, I don’t know what does. “There shouldn’t be a stigma against fun books,” Kleinman writes, as though challenging books can’t be fun, as though someone, somewhere, named Kleinman the arbiter of fun. (Hint: No one person is the arbiter of fun.) “If you’re super picky,” Kleinman says, “remember that fluffy books can be gateways into more serious literature.” And I couldn’t agree more. The X-men were, for me, the gateway to Gatsby. But why, I’d like to ask Kleinman, do you believe that we’ve all stopped at the gate, and why must you insist we loiter there, and not go in?
In the end, Kleinman is doing something rhetorically, but, for the life of me, I can’t say what that is. Unless the point is to rile us up? Or to draw attention to herself? (“Come at me, haters!” she tweeted, immediately following her article’s publication.) Maybe she just wanted to see if she could get some sucker (read: me) to fight back and to use her name a lot in my retort. Which, if that was her project, I guess she wins.
Whatever the case, Kleinman wouldn’t have liked my own book list, posted, coincidentally, the day of Kleinman’s diatribe, but before I’d read her piece. The list, if I had to do it over again, might change a little, but I followed the rules and wrote the list quickly without overthinking.
All of these books have stayed with me. All are among my favorites. Some I encountered in high school, some in college, and some in the past few years. Some have made me a better writer. All have made me a better person. I won’t apologize for any of them.
My list:
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
3. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
4. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill
5. The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley
6. The Restraint of Beasts, by Magnus Mills
7. Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
8. Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore
9. Walk Me to the Distance, by Percival Everett
10. At the Jim Bridger, by Ron Carlson
Photo: Chris JL
You know, I’m not even 100% sure Kleinman even took her own article 100% seriously. The kind of talk she put in that article is the kind that’s bound to rouse some ire and get attention, which is a plausible end goal of writing an article in the first place. If that’s the case, her “I win” tweet is, disturbingly enough, not inaccurate.
Either that or she really is that invested in her own shaky opinion, and thus beyond help.
I went to read her article after yours, and she simply doesn’t make any sense. I’m not one to troll around and attack people so I’ll stay away from commenting on her post, but it’s pretty clear that she didn’t understand the “assignment”. I enjoyed the part of her trying to justify 50 Shades needing to be on more lists because that’s what people would read if they wanted to read erotic fiction. Yes, well, the list isn’t meant to be top 10 erotic reads. And so on and so forth until our heads explode. More important than voicing disagreement… Read more »
The key words to this article are “changed your life”. While people may have recently read 50 Shades of Gray” (yuk), i can’t imagine it is one that they will remember 10 years from now or one that changed their life. Books that change your life or the way you think are, by definition, those that make you reflect on the world and your place in it. A popular book does not a life-changing book make.
Can’t wait to hear you talk about your collection of stories at Quail Ridge Books next month! It’s on my list of favorite books of 2014!
One of the real problems with the original article, obliquely pointed out here, is that Kreisman’s rant is mathematically unfounded. She claims that everyone is pretentious with their lists, but as the statistics show, that’s not what people actually wrote: One in every five status updates listed Harry Potter. So how can Harry Potter be the most listed book if everyone is “lying” and only listing Joyce and the gang? Obviously, it can’t, and in fact, of the top 3 books she complains about people putting on their lists, 2 of them are on fewer than 2 in 100 lists.… Read more »
It’s interesting watching Kleinman’s Twitter response to this. Perhaps true to her stance in general, she’s dismissive and takes a high status position as if any legitimate criticism of her argument is beneath her. Hmmm… With the “wit” and “intellect” on display, maybe her “real life” list is her ACTUAL list?
For reference: https://twitter.com/alexiskleinman/status/511573942515953666 and https://twitter.com/alexiskleinman/status/511574237715238912 and https://twitter.com/alexiskleinman/status/511575028219924480
Update on Kleinman’s Twitter: I tried to call her out on her response to this article, suggesting that “LOLOLOLOLOLOL” and “I win” (seen in Robert’s first and second links) were effectively not engaging with the actual points made in this article; my responses are also in that first link. She never responded to me directly, but after my first two tweets, she tweeted out to all her followers that she “will not respond to mean tweets,” at which point I asked her how she could consider her initial tweet NOT mean: https://twitter.com/alexiskleinman/status/511622647541555200 At that point she obliquely called me hateful… Read more »
Against the tide of intellectual malaise and commercialism, against the naysayers and cynics, Poissant offers this welcome beacon of hope and affirmation. I read popular books, but I have a special love for the “preposterous” ones.