Guardian: critics pan books women like (title mine)

[elleblue]

I want to nominate this editorial for a major award. (star)

[asdfjkl]

I think the disdain for YA fiction probably comes from adults not treating it like it's YA fiction and the fact that there are adults who don't read anything other than YA fiction, and that's kind of... well... I guess it's just fine as long as those people aren't wondering around talking about how well-read they are.  Which generally, they aren't.  So I guess I don't quite understand the obsession with adults reading YA.  I wish people read more.  I wish they read better stuff.  The adults reading YA aren't half the problem.

That aside, the hate of female authors and female readers is real and it's a problem.  Sue Monk Kidd immediately comes to mind as someone who is a truly spectacular writer and story teller and has been relegated to the stacks of chick-lit as if she's no better than Tom Clancey-for-women.  Even John Irving is getting his literary ass handed to him these days for being too sentimental (code: too many women are buying your books).  John Irving is the Charles Dickens of the 20th century.  But, damn it all if he's not going to be complete discredited because women like his books.

Another problem, though, is that too many people read stuff that is clearly NOT "literature" but insist that it is and women do that more than men. You never see some guy reading Jurassic Park and suggesting that it is actually literary fiction (meaning, it belongs in the canon).  But I'm reading the Outlander books right now and every time I meet someone (a woman) who has read them, I have to listen to how they are soooo well written, suuuuuch goood books, they are LITERATURE.

No they are not.  They just aren't.  They are really fun.  I mean REALLY fun.  I am loving reading them.  The same way I love McDonald's french fries.  A treat.  Not a meal.  People don't read enough to know the difference and then asshole critics like those in the OP take advantage of us in order to maintain their own job security. 

[elleblue]

There are people who insist Outlander is Literature? Huh. That's not to say I didn't enjoy reading it, I did, but I never thought anyone would claim it's Literature with a capital L.

[tiramisu]

Why do we have to read LITERATURE to be taken seriously? I read books that communicate emotions, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes strong. They may not use all kinds of symbolism, etc but they're enjoyable and get me thinking about people's experiences. That can happen without something being literature and without it being simplistic crap. I don't understand people insisting things like Twilight are worthwhile or literature, but I'm glad they're reading. I just can't get that upset about it.

[IIOY]

Gone Girl was complete shit and deserves more criticism than it received. I don't give a damn whether the author has a vag or peen. Total and complete shit.

[heyjude]

Nov 26, 2015 9:45:22 GMT -5 IIOY said:

Gone Girl was complete shit and deserves more criticism than it received. I don't give a damn whether the author has a vag or peen. Total and complete shit.

This opinion is complete shit and deserves more criticism than it will receive.


<3

[fumbalina]

I find myself in a YA ruta often because I get tired of trying to find adult fiction that does not have an overwhelming amount of sex. I would rather read any book that does not rely on sex to further the plot.

I occasionally read classic literature as well. Of course there is always the possibility it will infuriate me based on sexism, racism, and classism.

[asdfjkl]

Nov 25, 2015 22:06:59 GMT -5 elleblue said:

There are people who insist Outlander is Literature? Huh. That's not to say I didn't enjoy reading it, I did, but I never thought anyone would claim it's Literature with a capital L.

Dude.  There are THRONGS of people who are calling it Literature.  And in a way, I get it.  I understand why they're saying it.  It's not "typical" of chicklit.  There's more going on with it than there is in like Danielle Steel or... who else is a kind of mainstream beach book author.  I think the most I would agree with though, which I saw in a good reads review, is that it's beach books for lit nerds.  That makes sense to me.  But one of the things that consistently frustrates me with the book is the quality of writing, so I'm not offering it up for the canon.
#sardonically
#laconically
#LongStraightNose
#CatShapedEyes

Sorry.  No.

[asdfjkl]

Nov 25, 2015 22:40:09 GMT -5 tiramisu said:

Why do we have to read LITERATURE to be taken seriously? I read books that communicate emotions, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes strong. They may not use all kinds of symbolism, etc but they're enjoyable and get me thinking about people's experiences. That can happen without something being literature and without it being simplistic crap. I don't understand people insisting things like Twilight are worthwhile or literature, but I'm glad they're reading. I just can't get that upset about it.

You have to read literature to have an understanding of human culture.  Literature is where that is contained.  Along with history, and art, and the rest of the humanities.  I will die on this hill.  If you haven't read at least a stack of the classics you simply are not educated.  It's the same, IMO, as trying to suggest that you don't need to believe in evolution, or you don't need to know about Western Civ, or you don't need to have a passing understanding of the Constitution and how it operates.  Not to say that there aren't TONS of people who lack that knowledge, but lacking it, they are not educated.  And folks here seem to care about education.  Ergo - they must read some literature.  Not all of it.  Not a Shakespeare play a week.  Not *only* literature.  But, yes, you must read some literature.  Every now and then.  It helps make you a complete person.

Happy Thanksgiving.  That's my WOT for the month. 

[Deleted]

This obsession with labels...was the book enjoyable? Yay! The end.

[blink]

Next we're going to tell people if they watch Teen Mom or Dancing With The Stars they aren't educated unless they watch The Sopranos or Ben-Hur (movie, I know, don't care). Or that someone isn't educated unless they've seen classic plays, like The Phantom of the Opera, instead of Something Rotten or Wicked.

Books are another form of entertainment. They just so happen to have a much longer history than TV/movies and are more accessible (affordable) than plays/musicals.

Also with regards to art the "kitschy lowbrow" stuff has already come and gone, and it just so happens to be hanging in museums all over the world. Campbell's soup cans contain human culture! Or a square pave of bricks, or white on white squares!

Call literary fiction Literature. But people don't need to read it to be smart. Also realize that the other arts have transformed dramatically in the past two hundred years and perhaps Literature is in the process of doing the same.

I also get irritated at the Literature argument as if Western Society (white male western society for the most part) is the epitome of intellectual. Because outside of Europe and the US/Canada no one else has anything of value?

[ttt]

Nov 27, 2015 9:23:39 GMT -5 blink said:

Next we're going to tell people if they watch Teen Mom or Dancing With The Stars they aren't educated unless they watch The Sopranos or Ben-Hur (movie, I know, don't care). Or that someone isn't educated unless they've seen classic plays, like The Phantom of the Opera, instead of Something Rotten or Wicked.

Books are another form of entertainment. They just so happen to have a much longer history than TV/movies and are more accessible (affordable) than plays/musicals.

Also with regards to art the "kitschy lowbrow" stuff has already come and gone, and it just so happens to be hanging in museums all over the world. Campbell's soup cans contain human culture! Or a square pave of bricks, or white on white squares!

Call literary fiction Literature. But people don't need to read it to be smart. Also realize that the other arts have transformed dramatically in the past two hundred years and perhaps Literature is in the process of doing the same.

I also get irritated at the Literature argument as if Western Society (white male western society for the most part) is the epitome of intellectual. Because outside of Europe and the US/Canada no one else has anything of value?

Who said there's no literature outside of Europe and North America?
I would certainly put works by Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among Great Literature.

[blink]

Nov 27, 2015 9:56:30 GMT -5 ttt said:

Nov 27, 2015 9:23:39 GMT -5 blink said:

Next we're going to tell people if they watch Teen Mom or Dancing With The Stars they aren't educated unless they watch The Sopranos or Ben-Hur (movie, I know, don't care). Or that someone isn't educated unless they've seen classic plays, like The Phantom of the Opera, instead of Something Rotten or Wicked.

Books are another form of entertainment. They just so happen to have a much longer history than TV/movies and are more accessible (affordable) than plays/musicals.

Also with regards to art the "kitschy lowbrow" stuff has already come and gone, and it just so happens to be hanging in museums all over the world. Campbell's soup cans contain human culture! Or a square pave of bricks, or white on white squares!

Call literary fiction Literature. But people don't need to read it to be smart. Also realize that the other arts have transformed dramatically in the past two hundred years and perhaps Literature is in the process of doing the same.

I also get irritated at the Literature argument as if Western Society (white male western society for the most part) is the epitome of intellectual. Because outside of Europe and the US/Canada no one else has anything of value?

Who said there's no literature outside of Europe and North America?
I would certainly put works by Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfoiz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among Great Literature.

Because classics usually doesn't refer to things outside of wester civ. And the fact that only western civ and the US constituion has been mentioned in this thread thus far as indicators of intellect and education.

Perhaps I misread the intent, but for the most part Literature canon does not include non-western POVs, and even then usually only male and white ones. Minority and women authors often imo get pushed into their own 'special' canon or classes. So you don't learn about great black authors unless you look into the Harlem Renaissance, because it's not part of the normal literature canon.

I could easily be mistaken and I'm feeling argumentative today.

Eta: See I am dumb. But wrt those authors that is kind of my point. In many high school and.college classes where Literature and specifically canon works are meant to be read, those authors wouldn't get read and maybe they would get mentioned.

The same thing happens in art. There are Great Artists not from Europe or North America, but the only way to learn about them is to step outside of the canon of western art. They are not included in Modern art or art since 1980, or anything remotely similar.

[tiramisu]

Nov 27, 2015 10:17:20 GMT -5 blink said:

Nov 27, 2015 9:56:30 GMT -5 ttt said:

Who said there's no literature outside of Europe and North America?
I would certainly put works by Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfoiz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among Great Literature.

Because classics usually doesn't refer to things outside of wester civ. And the fact that only western civ and the US constituion has been mentioned in this thread thus far as indicators of intellect and education.

Perhaps I misread the intent, but for the most part Literature canon does not include non-western POVs, and even then usually only male and white ones. Minority and women authors often imo get pushed into their own 'special' canon or classes. So you don't learn about great black authors unless you look into the Harlem Renaissance, because it's not part of the normal literature canon.

I could easily be mistaken and I'm feeling argumentative today.

Eta: See I am dumb. But wrt those authors that is kind of my point. In many high school and.college classes where Literature and specifically canon works are meant to be read, those authors wouldn't get read and maybe they would get mentioned.

The same thing happens in art. There are Great Artists not from Europe or North America, but the only way to learn about them is to step outside of the canon of western art. They are not included in Modern art or art since 1980, or anything remotely similar.

This is what I was feeling but didn't know how to articulate. I don't like the emphasis on the traditional literature because it excludes so many perspectives. One of the things I appreciated about my college experience was that the core courses I needed to take didn't include civics. Instead we read so many other things and learned perspectives from historically marginalized groups. We learned to analyze things like movies, music, etc to understand what they say about the time and culture within which they were created. I learned that there is great value beyond the typical canon and had my thinking expanded by that, for which I'll always be grateful. I learned more from that than I did from reading literary classics. So no, I don't think that's the only way to be well educated.

[heyjude]

I love it when CEP talks books.

It's always such a fun and interesting conversation. This is not sarcastic. Some of our loftier debates have been about books. It's a nice change of pace.

[tacosforlife]

I feel like there are two separate conversations going on in here - whether people need to read literature, however one defines it, and whether women's books are more readily panned than men's.

On the second issue, I think we see this across all forms of media, so it doesn't surprise me at all that it's true for books. Hell, my own husband, one of the most feminist men I know, reads crap mystery novels but for some reason won't pick up crap mystery novels written by female authors.

[sparrowsong]

How have I never heard of A Little Life? I usually do read most of the books that become super popular but I totally missed that one.

I have other thoughts on this but hate typing long responses on my phone. MAybe tonight if the conversation is still going.

[secretlyevil]

Life is too short, read what you want, as long as you read.

[msmerymac]

It occurred to me this week that the two albums that have sold the most copies in a single week (Adele's 25 and NSYNC's No Strings Attached) achieved that mainly because of women.

And Hollywood can bitch all it wants about how women directors, all-female-casts, or feminist subject matter won't sell tickets, but I think ticket sales to women were a large part of what made movies like Titanic, Twilight and the Hunger Games so successful, so those notions don't seem that impossible.

So I'm not shocked that women-focused, best-selling books are constantly targeted as less-than. Literature or not (and while I haven't yet read the Goldfinch, I'd wager the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is somewhat literary), these books are successful and influential, and prove women are, too.

[Velvetshady]

Nov 27, 2015 10:17:20 GMT -5 blink said:

Nov 27, 2015 9:56:30 GMT -5 ttt said:

Who said there's no literature outside of Europe and North America?
I would certainly put works by Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfoiz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among Great Literature

Eta: See I am dumb. But wrt those authors that is kind of my point. In many high school and.college classes where Literature and specifically canon works are meant to be read, those authors wouldn't get read and maybe they would get mentioned.

The same thing happens in art. There are Great Artists not from Europe or North America, but the only way to learn about them is to step outside of the canon of western art. They are not included in Modern art or art since 1980, or anything remotely similar.

Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. I think that any college-level Literature program that doesn't include his writing is a piss-poor Literature program. And if you want to read something by him, I usually suggest starting with Miramar. If you like that, then you should like most of his other work. 

I'd also want to add Khaled Hosseini to the Great Literature discussion.

[emisi]

I think a lot of the problem is that a lot of people (see: male literature critics) still think of women as non-educated, fluff-loving dimwits. We can't possibly wrap our brains around difficult subjects, so anything women like must therefore be worthless fluff. It's horrible and so misogynistic.

Having said that, I hate literary novels. I find them boring. I do love hardcore sci-fi though, so it's not that I don't like hard subjects or difficult concepts, it's that when I read, I usually do it to escape from my mundane life, and reading literary novels has never done that for me.

[asdfjkl]

Nov 27, 2015 9:23:39 GMT -5 blink said:

Next we're going to tell people if they watch Teen Mom or Dancing With The Stars they aren't educated unless they watch The Sopranos or Ben-Hur (movie, I know, don't care). Or that someone isn't educated unless they've seen classic plays, like The Phantom of the Opera, instead of Something Rotten or Wicked.

Books are another form of entertainment. They just so happen to have a much longer history than TV/movies and are more accessible (affordable) than plays/musicals.

Also with regards to art the "kitschy lowbrow" stuff has already come and gone, and it just so happens to be hanging in museums all over the world. Campbell's soup cans contain human culture! Or a square pave of bricks, or white on white squares!

Call literary fiction Literature. But people don't need to read it to be smart. Also realize that the other arts have transformed dramatically in the past two hundred years and perhaps Literature is in the process of doing the same.

I also get irritated at the Literature argument as if Western Society (white male western society for the most part) is the epitome of intellectual. Because outside of Europe and the US/Canada no one else has anything of value?

No.

[asdfjkl]

Nov 27, 2015 10:17:20 GMT -5 blink said:

Nov 27, 2015 9:56:30 GMT -5 ttt said:

Who said there's no literature outside of Europe and North America?
I would certainly put works by Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfoiz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among Great Literature.

Because classics usually doesn't refer to things outside of wester civ. And the fact that only western civ and the US constituion has been mentioned in this thread thus far as indicators of intellect and education.

Perhaps I misread the intent, but for the most part Literature canon does not include non-western POVs, and even then usually only male and white ones. Minority and women authors often imo get pushed into their own 'special' canon or classes. So you don't learn about great black authors unless you look into the Harlem Renaissance, because it's not part of the normal literature canon.

I could easily be mistaken and I'm feeling argumentative today.

Eta: See I am dumb. But wrt those authors that is kind of my point. In many high school and.college classes where Literature and specifically canon works are meant to be read, those authors wouldn't get read and maybe they would get mentioned.

The same thing happens in art. There are Great Artists not from Europe or North America, but the only way to learn about them is to step outside of the canon of western art. They are not included in Modern art or art since 1980, or anything remotely similar.

It is one thing to argue for the inclusion of more women and more ethnic diversity in the canon.  It is another thing to say you don't need to read literature to be educated.  You started with the latter argument and now you're trying to defend that position by suggesting the former.  I'm not sure which thing you actually believe.  But if you are of the "It's totes okay to read nothing but Tom Clancy and not know anything about how your government works" camp, I think you are really, really, super, amazingly, phenomenally ultra WRONG.  

[asdfjkl]

Nov 27, 2015 22:15:53 GMT -5 Velvetshady said:

Nov 27, 2015 10:17:20 GMT -5 blink said:

Eta: See I am dumb. But wrt those authors that is kind of my point. In many high school and.college classes where Literature and specifically canon works are meant to be read, those authors wouldn't get read and maybe they would get mentioned.

The same thing happens in art. There are Great Artists not from Europe or North America, but the only way to learn about them is to step outside of the canon of western art. They are not included in Modern art or art since 1980, or anything remotely similar.

Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. I think that any college-level Literature program that doesn't include his writing is a piss-poor Literature program. And if you want to read something by him, I usually suggest starting with Miramar. If you like that, then you should like most of his other work. 

I'd also want to add Khaled Hosseini to the Great Literature discussion.

Yes.

[josieposy]

*goes back to reading her Calvin and Hobbes books*

[StrawberryBlondie]

I was a brit lit major in college. For the most part, that ruined "literature" for me.

[laurenpetro]

Nov 29, 2015 13:44:20 GMT -5 StrawberryBlondie said:

I was a brit lit major in college. For the most part, that ruined "literature" for me.

I feel this way about Shakespeare.

[oscarnerdjulief]

Nov 29, 2015 13:44:20 GMT -5 StrawberryBlondie said:

I was a brit lit major in college. For the most part, that ruined "literature" for me.

No kidding.  I didn't like much of anything I read in History of the British Novel or British Literature II.  (I chose another class instead of British Literature I.) 

I have found that I enjoy reading non-fiction, especially history and biography, way more than fiction.  However, the last four fictional works I read were very enjoyable: "Gone Girl," "Big Little Lies," "Girl on a Train" (or the Train, I forget which) by Hawkins, and "Brooklyn."

Highly, highly recommend "Brooklyn," by the way.

If you are interested in learning about the rise of ISIS, "Black Flags" is an excellent read.  Similarly, anyone who wants to learn more about politics in the late nineteenth century should read "The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters" by a person you dislike.

[oscarnerdjulief]

Nov 26, 2015 10:30:10 GMT -5 heyjude said:

Nov 26, 2015 9:45:22 GMT -5 IIOY said:

Gone Girl was complete shit and deserves more criticism than it received. I don't give a damn whether the author has a vag or peen. Total and complete shit.

This opinion is complete shit and deserves more criticism than it will receive.


<3

I "liked" this rejoinder under the assumption that it was ironic.

[heyjude]

Nov 29, 2015 15:10:45 GMT -5 oscarnerdjulief said:

Nov 26, 2015 10:30:10 GMT -5 heyjude said:

This opinion is complete shit and deserves more criticism than it will receive.


<3

I "liked" this rejoinder under the assumption that it was ironic.

Lol. Not really. I thought Gone Girl was great.