“Easy Words” and the Tyranny of Literature

Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics, squelches humor, and rewards anger. That’s why I still blog.

I don’t want to rehash last week’s Threads debacle over what constitutes excessively difficult language. The two accompanying images should suffice. One platform user requested authors to “use easy words,” citing scrying as an example of needless difficulty. (Some defenders claim this was a joke, though the humor eludes me.) Following a Kelly Marie Tran-level pile-on, another user posted a defense that made things worse by correlating dictionary use with ableism.

The post that created the controversy

I’m more interested in the underlying assumptions about literacy, ability, and writing. As a sometime writing teacher, I recall struggling with students who used clipped vocabulary, short sentences, and especially passive voice construction. I don’t like getting involved in the controversy surrounding America’s purported literacy crisis, mostly because it feels like a media-fueled moral panic. But youth do, anecdotally, have difficulty writing nowadays.

Which is, on consideration, weird. If anything, young adults write more today than my generation did. Emails, text messages, social media posts—these remain mostly language-based communication modes. Youth share in online discussion boards, chat-based RPGs, and other participatory, text-centric communications. Platforms like Smashwords, AO3, and Wattpad have turned youth into published authors without kowtowing to the Big Five publishing conglomerates.

Yet that practice didn’t translate into greater writing capability in my classroom. I recall students using the justification that “I write how I speak,” which I think they believed meant they used a casual tone and relaxed grammar, without a lot of pausing to consider the nuances of word choice. Which, fair enough, I often do too, especially when writing fiction and trying to capture a character’s authentic voice.

So why the difficulty? Students came into my Freshman Comp class having written far more than my peers did outside the classroom (notwithstanding us aspiring authors). They use their own characteristic tones, rather than trying to affect a scholarly tone. They should be able to produce something beyond the short sentences, sweeping generalizations, and tedious reliance on “to be” verbs that plagued me attempting to read their output.

Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but the difference probably involves not what content youth read, but where they read it. Yes, youth write copious text messages. But the SMS format, and the difficulty typing with thumbs, discourages long sentences and nuanced vocabulary. Heck, it even discourages punctuation. I used to wonder why students had such difficulty with comma placement, but texting discourage comma use altogether.

The attempted defense that made things worse

Scrying seems, to me, a pretty straightforward word. I discovered it in grade school while reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the Brothers Grimm, besides being adults themselves, were also transcribing oral tales delivered by community elders, tales which had been passed down, largely intact, across generations. I read books commensurate with my reading ability, mostly published by conglomerate publishers, written by experienced professional authors, who were mostly adults.

You might detect an element of elitism in this, and I won’t deny it. Not just anybody who constructs a sentence is an author, but the person who learns from the best sentence builders of the past and present. Just like not everybody at karaoke is a singer, but the ones who take the time to learn vocalism and breath control and range, the capacity to write comes from apprenticing oneself to better writers and working at it for years.

Instead, youth write copious texts to their friends, but much of their reading consists of texts from their friends. Too many aspiring authors who post fanfic to Wattpad mostly read other fanfic authors on Wattpad. Rather than giving them something to strive after, and challenging content that refines their thinking, it results in a persistent regression toward the mean, as all new writing resembles what came before.

That original Threads user didn’t deserve the abuse they received, a dogpile so severe that they apparently fled social media. But “easy words” is a request for reading as a passive activity, which readers fall into without resistance. It’s a request to feel good enough as we are, to have authors hug us and say “good job.” That’s not a kind of reading I want to do.

Reading and Thinking in a Paranoid Age

Johann Hari

Yesterday, as I write, I finished reading a book. Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have merited an announcement; I did it as regularly as breathing. But this has become more rare and remarkable, and as a book blogger, I have concrete evidence that this is the first time I closed a book and proclaimed “Finished!” in nearly three months. Not that I haven’t read, but I haven’t followed one book through to the end.

Nor am I alone. Anecdotally, my friends report a massive increase in doomscrolling, perhaps the most passive activity which modernity permits. One sits with a small, pocket-sized computer, flipping listlessly through two or three orphan apps, hoping something jumps out urgently enough to fill the spiritual void we all apparently share. Nothing arrives, of course. But the hope of finding something provides a greater sense of reward than getting up and doing something constructive can.

Johann Hari synopsizes the multi-pronged science behind this decline. Some of it comes innately from just getting older, as it becomes harder to create new synaptic connections. Activities which come easily to youth and young adults, like reading, studying, or handicrafts, just grow harder for adults, and we need to develop discipline enough to overcome this. So yes, if reading and art seem more difficult than when you were small, that isn’t just rosy-eyed nostalgia.

But the problem isn’t wholly internal. Technology critics note that our smartphones, tablets, and other screen technology have addictive qualities. App developers maximize the hypnotic quality of their interfaces, utilizing design principles that make us want to stare. Streaming content on platforms like Netflix and Disney+ have more camera cuts and other jolt moments than the broadcast television I grew up watching, which triggers the reptile brain to keep watching, scanning for further life-saving inputs.

I cringe, though, at the word “addictive.” The concept of addiction gets misused in government PR and middle-school “Just Say No” curricula. Often, to describe something as “addictive” implies almost magical properties, like a cursed object that weakens and destroys its owner. This isn’t so. Not everyone who tries cannabis or cocaine becomes addicted, just as not everyone who fiddles on social media on their phones becomes addicted. Something deeper and more primal happens first.

Dr. Gabor Maté

As addiction specialist Gabor Maté writes, addictions develop under specific circumstances. Some people become addicted after life-shaping traumas: childhood abuse and neglect mold children’s brains in ways that protect them as kids, but are maladaptive in adults. Addicts consume their product to numb their trauma scars. Other addicts have more fleeting issues. The second-leading cause of addiction is loneliness, which addicts can overcome through sociability. For AA participants, spirituality arguably matters less than the meetings.

What, then turns screens addictive? Returning to Hari, he writes that certain life experiences create trauma-like effects on the brain. This includes certain forms of uncertainty, including poverty, homelessness, and war. Many American soldiers notoriously became heroin addicts in Vietnam, then cleared up when they returned to civilian life. I grew up believing that people became homeless because they were addicts, but that’s backward; they become addicts because they’re homeless. Substances take the fear away.

America’s economy has created unprecedented prosperity, but hasn’t distributed it equitably. Elon Musk is currently angling to become our first trillionaire, while uncountable underemployed Americans rely on multiple part-time jobs and gig work to stay afloat. I’ve bounced among short-term jobs for three years, often panicking to keep rent paid and lights on. When I pause between hustles, that allows time for thoughts to emerge, reminding me of every bill about to go into arrears.

Hari and Maté agree that such uncertainty warps the brain. In conditions of constant fear, the limbic system, and especially the amygdala, gets bigger, while the prefrontal cortex withers. A larger amygdala makes us highly reactive, even downright paranoid. An atrophied cortex means less self-discipline, and just as importantly, less ability to empathize with strangers. Both of these make us too impatient for the detail work and contemplative pace of reading or of creating art.

Uncertainty and paranoia have become our standard of life. Not just economic uncertainty, but street violence and wars of choice permeate our daily lives. This results in a population more primed for fear, snap reactions, and restlessness. Into that circumstance, streaming TV media increasingly gives us very loud, aggressive, juddery content that sates our need for stimulation. Something as sedate as reading or listening to classical music seems quaint. So no, it’s not just me.

An English Curriculum that Freshmen Might Read

First edition jacket art

A fellow worker pointed at my t-shirt and smiled. “The Great Gatsby! That’s the only book I actually finished reading in high school English.” We were working the assembly line, and I’d shown up wearing a t-shirt featuring Francis Cugat’s iconic dust-jacket painting for The Great Gatsby. Our assembly line team had a whole range of education levels, from high-school dropouts to postgraduates who’d never found a job.

I’d heard people admit they didn’t read before. As a former college adjunct, I heard a panoply of excuses for long-term aversion to reading, which mostly boiled down to: I never learned to appreciate it as a child, and now that I'm grown, it’s too difficult to develop the habit. But this broke the pattern, because the person didn’t highlight his non-reading, he spotlighted the one book which penetrated his armor.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become one of those books, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which we simply expect high schoolers to read. Someone possessing an American diploma should understand allusions to this handful of celebrity books. Yet as my co-worker pointed out, not everyone reads every “great” book. Whether from overwork, or unfamiliarity with dated language, or just plain disinterest, many students skim or skip books altogether.

My co-worker couldn’t finish most “great” books because English was his second language. Most important literature was written in language that, to his limited English, looked looping, ornate, and Yoda-like. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, was plainspoken, notwithstanding its luxurious milieu, and didn’t demand a dictionary to parse ordinary sentences. My co-worker could concisely describe his relationship with that novel, and reading in general, and eventually felt free to ask how to improve his reading goingforward.

Yet he also made me reconsider how we choose our literary canon. In Freshman English, I remember being assigned Homer’s Odessey, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Important words, definitely, but not works which most freshmen are prepared to savvy, not even highly literate ones who already enjoy reading. These works left students climbing the walls, desperate for validation that we weren’t stupid for failing to understand.

First edition jacket art

F. Scott Fitzgerald stands in an unusual position within the literary canon. Though famous now for his novels, he made his early living publishing for glossy magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which were read then by mass audiences. After the 1929 stock market crash made Fitzgerald’s hymns to nouveau riche excess seem tasteless, he relocated to Hollywood and became a script doctor. He wrote, that is, for mass audiences, in vernacular English, with an eye toward images.

You know who else wrote for mass audiences with image-friendly prose? Dashiell Hammett. His classic The Maltese Falcon, arguably his career peak, is in many ways the anti-Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is chummy with New York’s fiercest gangsters; Sam Spade has an adversarial relationship with the police. Gatsby romanticizes women, especially Daisy Buchanan, without really knowing them; Spade enjoys women, but doesn’t revere them, and surrenders his latest lover to the gumshoes.

Perhaps most importantly, Jay Gatsby has no moral code, except perhaps whatever makes him rich enough to court Daisy Buchanan. Spade, by contrast, is so hog-tied by his own unique, self-written moral code that it costs him lucrative paydays. He’s forced to live in squalor, sleep on a Murphy bed, and eat his beans from the can. He’s almost the diametrical opposite of Gatsby—while still being written in simple, imagistic language that high schoolers can understand.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve written before about the importance of students reading books beyond their immediate comprehension, and how that changes their brain circuitry for the better. But too many teachers—underfunded, short-staffed, and hurt for time—lack the resources necessary to guide students to higher comprehension. I remember my Ninth Grade English teacher telling the class explicitly that we could tell Ernest Hemingway was deep because we couldn’t understand him.

Pairing The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon would provide Freshman-level English teachers the opportunity to discuss important themes in American literature, while speaking an English that most students understand. Other “literary” writers tend to be hermetic, like Hemingway; abstruse, like Eliot; or simply outdated, like Mark Twain. Yes, Hammett writes about unseemly themes, like infidelity, racism, and violence, but so does Faulkner. Students have seen worse on TV.

And if it means more working-class students glowing up for their favorite book, well, that’s a win for everybody.

Lost in a Good Book

Kenneth Branagh as Henry V

I remember my first encounter with Shakespeare. It was Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 big-screen adaptation of Henry V. The local newspaper reviewer lavished lengthy praise upon its complexity, its nuance, and its almost-complete thematic reversal from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 paean to conquest. I knew little about Shakespeare, beyond his reputation, and a few oft-quoted lines (“To be or not to be,”) so I decided to give Branagh a try.

So I rented the VHS, sat down to watch, and greeted the production with… complete incomprehension. Who was this strange person in modern dress, played by Derek Jacobi, who introduced the film, and kept recurring throughout? Who are these various courtiers who appear for only one scene to speak Delphic riddles? And are these characters even speaking English? I could answer none of these questions with any confidence.

I call this my first encounter with Shakespeare, even though my 9th Grade English teacher had us read Julius Caesar several months earlier. But I have difficulty crediting that initial reading. This teacher had us perform weird exercises too hasty and premature for first-time Shakespeare readers, like designing the set, or translating the dialog into vernacular English. But several months later, this same teacher insisted we could tell Ernest Hemingway was profound because we couldn’t understand him, so I have difficulty taking her seriously anyway.

So Branagh’s Henry was my first direct Shakespeare, unmediated by interpreters or state-credentialed Cicerones. I leapt headlong into Henry and immediately got lost. I found the experience so unsettling that I didn’t repeat it for nearly two years, studiously sidling away from the Bard, except a mandatory 10th-Grade sojourn with King Lear. Again, officially mandated curriculum confused more than it clarified.

David Tennant as Hamlet

However, when Zeferelli’s Hamlet hit home video, the one with Mel Gibson, I heard the hype, swallowed my doubts, and tried again. The experience was totally different. I can’t say I completely understood everything, but I certainly followed events more clearly. I sometimes had to pick meaning from context, and many outdated words or high-flown phrases evaded me altogether. But I had a real experience this time, one I’d willingly repeat.

I figured the director might’ve made the difference, or perhaps the performers, or even the visual design. For whatever reason, it never creased my brain that I myself might’ve changed. That perhaps having thrown myself into King Henry, and even being dragged unwillingly through Caesar or Lear, might’ve changed my perspective. Only after I purchased paperback editions of several plays, and read them myself, did I realize: Shakespeare had rewired my brain.

This realization hit me like a cold slap several years later when, browsing my local bookstore, I encountered something called No Fear Shakespeare. Available for all Shakespeare’s major plays, and most of his minor ones, it offers the full Shakespearean text, with a facing-page translation into vernacular English prose. Rather than providing useful definitions of individual words and phrases, as the Folger editions I read did, it simply restates everything, with the poetry taken out.

Similar editions exist, under series titles like Shakespeare Made Easy, Shakespeare Side-by-Side, and Shakespeare ReTold. Each promises frustrated students that they needn’t strain their already overtaxed brains understanding Shakespeare; some expert somewhere, who doesn’t get title-page billing, has done the understanding already. You need only memorize the plot points likely to appear on a pop quiz, and you’re golden!

Jon Finch as Macbeth

This isn’t the place to expound on overloaded students and their teachers, suffering budget cuts and staffing shortages, aiming not for deeper thought but to ace standardized tests. We all have opinions. Rather, I mean only to state that, if students have the difficulty sanded off difficult books, I question whether they’re truly learning. By which I mean, are they truly having their brains rewired by exposure to unfamiliar ideas?

For me, the difficulty understanding Shakespeare wasn’t a bug in the system. The difficulty was the system. By forcing me to adjust my mental rhythms to match Shakespeare’s, I needed to step outside myself, to encounter new ways of thinking. I emerged transformed, better able to handle sophisticated questions and empathize with unfamiliar people, because I did the work of understanding Shakespeare myself, not outsourcing it to designated experts.

I’ve read pundits recently extolling the virtues of boredom or failure, traits putatively missing from modern education. But what about the virtue of confusion? If I’d understood Shakespeare like reading a paperback novel, I would’ve missed the joy of dawning awareness. And I fear that’s a pleasure today’s students will scarcely know.

Hastings Entertainment and the Chain Store Implosion

The Hastings storefront in Lawrence, Kansas—my home away from home

When news emerged last month that Amarillo, Texas-based chain bookstore Hastings Entertainment had sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, I had mixed feelings. Hastings, having dominated the books and entertainment market in my town for decades, has successfully squeezed all competitors out. If Hastings fails, the only bookstore in my town will be a local start-up specializing in remainders. That and WalMart.

However, Hastings’ recent business choices have seemed counterproductive for years. Four or five years ago, they removed the comfy chairs and benches that made their stores welcoming places to meet friends. A handful of stores have tried selling coffee, but it was attempted only limply chain-wide. Most stores have reduced space dedicated to core products, like books and DVDs, redirecting the space to toys and tie-in merchandising.

The Hastings business model has always focused on middle-sized towns. They select communities ranging from roughly twenty-five-thousand to a quarter-million people, too small for superstores like Barnes & Noble, then import their mixed-product marketing structure. Like most big-box stores, Hastings has no interest in local culture. Communities accept its prodigiously bland content marketing and beige decor in exchange for access to diverse, nationally marketed media products and services.

When I first encountered Hastings in 1995, the same year Amazon.com first went online. While Amazon took years to break even, Hastings was already an established name. While visiting Kearney, Nebraska, a friend directed me to Hastings, telling me “they have everything.” Back then, e-readers didn’t exist, and music downloads were illegal and massively time-consuming. Hastings’ selection of books and CDs made this media junkie’s eyes sparkle.

Equally important, the store seemed inviting. Kearney back then had independent book and music stores, both located in the city’s mall, but space was at a premium, not uncommon for locally owned businesses. Aisles were relatively narrow, making people turn sideways to pass between shelves. Hastings, by contrast, not only had spacious aisles, it had wide arterial corridors, like a department store, and benches for sitting. It felt comfortably public.

All that remains of the once-proud Hastings store in my hometown,
in Kearney, Nebraska, is this ugly mall-based toystore

I returned to Kearney in 1999 for my education, and found a local economy transformed. The independent book and music stores had failed, leaving Hastings and WalMart to split the media market. With Amazon still somewhat marginal, this meant a starkly narrowed marketplace. And though Kearney entrepreneurs have since opened new book and vinyl record stores, those remain largely hobbies. Chain stores still dominate the media market.

Different communities will handle Hastings’ reorganization different ways. My second home of Lawrence, Kansas, has a large Hastings store, so it’ll feel the pinch, but it also has three independently owned bookstores, and a vinyl record store with a sideline in CDs. Lawrence can accommodate one store’s closure. Without serious competitors in Kearney, Hastings’ closure would blow a hole in our town’s economy.

But arguably, that’s the point. Throughout the latter Twentieth Century, massive chains increasingly dominated America’s market in almost everything. Subsidized by the Interstate Highway System, which made just-in-time resupply patterns possible and inexpensive, stores from Hastings and WalMart, to Sears, McDonalds, and Petco dominated regional markets. They made American culture uniform, but they also concentrated decision-making authority in a dwindling number of out-of-town hands.

The Internet retailing revolution was supposed to drive the final nail in independent American retailing’s coffin. Instead, national chains like Gottschalk’s, Osco, and Circuit City have all vanished since 2008, and one quarter of America’s largest malls have failed in the same time. I’d contend the Internet has proven less equipped to vend goods, than the static blandness chain stores once peddled. Hastings, diverse but bland, has joined that choir.

Hastings petitioned for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—short-term protection from creditors during internal reorganization. Thus the situation needn’t be terminal. In recent years, Chrysler, Texaco, and Pacific Gas & Electric have passed through Chapter 11 and emerged resilient. But Enron and Lehman Brothers didn’t. Hastings has announced its intent to sell itself out, but will close if no buyers arrive. Chapter 11, right now, is a legal limbo where corporate souls await judgement.

Chains like Hastings, Circuit City, and Tower Records achieved market dominance by squeezing smaller competition. Capitalist cheerleaders applauded, because victory is everything. These chains, some said, won on prices and selection, which small competitors couldn’t provide. But chains couldn’t respond to local demands; their supply chain was too long. When even bigger, blander rivals pinched the market, the chains folded.

Failing chains like Hastings temporarily narrow the market. But they’ve narrowed it for generations. I’ll miss my local Hastings, but it merely fell victim to forces it once manipulated to its own advantage. And it proves why the market matters more than the capitalists who have sucked it dry.

Why Must You Talk To Me While I'm Reading?

Short story writer Lindsay Merbaum, writing last week on women-centered website Bustle, asked a very valid question: Why Won't Men Leave Me Alone When I'm Trying To Read In Public? She describes men accosting her, practically cross-examining her behavior, challenging the validity of actually reading in public. She quotes friends who have faced everything from rude rebuffs to sexual propositions while reading, alone, in bars and restaurants.

Merbaum makes many excellent points, which anybody who’s tried to read in public places will find painfully familiar. But she makes one fundamental error: she assumes the challenges she faces reflect her gender. She assumes these men wouldn’t treat her thusly without her gender. She even equates book-based boorishness with leering and sexual harassment. I disagree. In my experience, the operant challenge here isn’t Merbaum’s gender; it’s her book.

Speaking as a dude who reads significantly, I’ve observed people—mostly indeed men—see my book as public invitation for conversation. Some are dedicated readers too, and want to share that experience. Others see my book as threatening them for reasons buried inside subtextual strata. Some just talk. But somehow, my book’s physical presence invites certain people, a small but vocal minority, to start talking, while I’m trying to read.

This week at work, I’ve been reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura, a pivotal moment in the Italian Renaissance. On Tuesday, a goateed electrician asked the title, then began holding forth, at length, about something he’d read recently about Tipler cylinders. In fairness, the topic sounds fascinating; but I had thirty minutes to eat my sandwich and read, and didn’t solicit this conversation.

On Wednesday, a plumber noticed me reading, and began asking about the book. Who was Lucretius? Why is one poem so important? Why would Lucretius write about physics in verse? The plumber’s engagement was gratifying, I confess, but again, lunch break is brief, and I read partly to separate myself from the constant chatter around the workplace. Then on Thursday, the same electrician wanted to know more about the book.

Holy schlamoly.

Partly, I suspect, people notice the contrast between an essentially private, internal activity, reading, and my public venue. Like napping or changing clothes, reading publically isn’t necessarily offensive, but does make people feel awkward. Should I keep silent? Why would someone read in this noisy, cluttered environment? Is this person judging me because I’m not reading? My book creates cognitive dissonance they reconcile by trying to talk.

The fact that men mainly engage me at work proves little, since my workplace is overwhelmingly male. Of over a hundred workers, only four are women, and one speaks little English. But reading in other environments merits comments too, mostly from men. Reading in bars, as Merbaum notes, elicits male comments. Women leave me alone—even when I’d rather they spoke. Men feel compelled to talk about my book.

Restaurants, with seating turned inward, are somewhat better. Strangers don’t intrude. Except waiters. When women take my order, they respect my privacy, offering only whatever conversation is necessary to keep me fed. Male waiters talk. And not just waiters. Anneli Rufus recommends introverts eating alone dine at the bar, as it elicits fewer comments and judgmental stares. I say, don’t bring a book. Your bartender will try to converse.

This realization, that others plague me with unwanted conversation, makes things awkward when I see women reading publically. As an aging bachelor, I still hope someday to marry and start a family. And since I got unceremoniously ejected from my university job, I have vanishingly few opportunities to meet erudite women. Women reading in public are advertising their cerebral tendencies, their intellectual curiosity, their willingness to encounter new ideas.

They’re also advertising that they’d like to read their book. Watching the collision between reading, a private activity, and the public milieu, gives me pause. Are they open to approach because we’re amid people, or should I respect their solitude while reading? I usually give them their seclusion, because there’s no simple answer. But my trade-off, for respecting women’s privacy, is that I’m unmarried in my forties.

Unfortunately, there’s no etiquette for handling public readers. There’s no out-and-out censure like for clearly undesirable behavior, like fighting or groping. Neither is there a clearly acceptable test of willingness. Sighting a beautiful woman, I can sound her out by buying her next drink… unless she’s reading. So I understand Merbaum’s complaint, from both sides. I lack any suitable solution.

In Defense of Books On Amazon

The Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, Kansas

This past weekend, I visited Lawrence, Kansas, and as I do whenever I’m in down, I swung by The Raven Bookstore. I picked up a book and a low-gloss literary magazine. Lawrence is fortunate enough to have three good-quality, locally owned bookstores within highly trafficked one block. While chatting with the clerk, she thanked me for purchasing there, rather than online. I smiled, returned her thanks, and said: “Shopping here is so much more of a sensory pleasure than Amazon or wherever.”

The words had hardly passed my lips before I realized the import. I permeate my blog with buying links to Amazon, who directly provides over half the books I review. I purchase from Amazon semi-regularly, more so since my town’s biggest bookstore basically retooled itself as a tchotchke outlet. Without Amazon’s recommendation features, I probably never would’ve discovered several books that have proven formative in my understanding of modern life.

But I also realize many good critics with unimpeachable reasoning have condemned Amazon for coarsening America’s publishing industry. Novelist/poet Ursula K. le Guin has characterized Amazon as “the BS Machine.” They’re regularly chastened for undercutting individual entrepreneurs, with good reason—though Wal-Mart has arguably done more in that direction, for far longer. Simply put, Amazon has narrowed the publisher-to-purchaser pipeline, at great social cost.

Still, I can’t bring myself to buy it.

Lawrence, Kansas, is wealthy, educated, and progressive-minded enough to have supported its historic downtown while neighboring communities rushed to build malls. This continuity proved foresighted, as malls and big-box retailers collapsed en masse during the Great Recession. Because malls involve massive buy-in costs, they’re prohibitively expensive for indie stores. Entrepreneurs and local owners absolutely require old buildings in classic communities, which don’t exist everywhere, to remain economically viable.

Amazon's first, highly controversial, brick-and-mortar store in Seattle, Washington

Before Amazon, high-minded critics blamed book superstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble for the then-current publishing environment. Before that, it was book racks at airports and drugstores. Or they blamed mall stores. This invariably overlooks one important point: such “downmarket” book-buying opportunities make reading, and literacy, available to people who are too geographically isolated, socially marginal, or poor to visit high-end indie retailers.

Such criticisms bespeak unquestioned economic privilege. As Naomi Klein put it over fifteen years ago, “media types tend to care more passionately about where they buy their books than where they buy their socks.” Some might immediately claim that Amazon sells socks and other staples; books have long-since receded from their retailing spotlight. But that’s consistent with Klein’s overall point, that retail consolidation has overwhelmed most Americans’ buying options.

Big-box discount stores amalgamated purchasing of life’s most important commodities several generations ago. I can enter any Wal-Mart SuperCenter at 2 a.m. and purchase food, electronics, clothing, car parts, and ammunition. Anything I can’t purchase at these stores could, charitably, be characterized as “luxury goods.” Poor Americans in particular, including those who work for Wal-Mart, can hardly afford to shop anywhere else. Amazon is an afterthought for such customers.

Nor is big-box buying exclusive to America’s poor. Levittown-style suburbanism, which made home ownership available to working-class citizens with GI Bill benefits after World War II, are deeply immune to localism, and lack downtowns like Lawrence. Despite empirical evidence that nobody wants new suburban developments anymore, developers keep building them, mainly because they’re cheap. But risky, independent-minded ventures, like the Raven, are priced out of suburbanism just like malls.

Interior of the Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, Kansas

Besides this, we must remember where the purchasing happens, not just by whom. The last indie bookstore in my area folded, priced out by a chain store, when Amazon was still a money-losing experimental venture. Once the chain store had absolute dominion over the local media goods market, it repurposed itself, making books marginal. My nearest large bookstore is an hour’s drive away; my nearest good bookstore, much further.

(In fairness, a new indie opened here later. However, it mainly sells remainders, salted with tables of bestsellers and local authors. It’s interesting, but unprepared to compete more widely.)

No, Amazon isn’t perfect: it uses monopsony power to squeeze publishers, and floods markets with cheap books. And it excludes those who can’t buy on plastic. Dedicated complainers have many populist grievances against Amazon’s business model.

But Amazon makes books available in rural, suburban, and poor areas in ways physical stores just can’t. Complaints about Amazon’s market domination, like complaints about mall stores a generation ago, reek of unexamined economic privilege. In an economy where books have become hard to find, it makes sure literacy is available. That’s something worth defending.

The Life Of Woman In 1001 Books

Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading too Much

Upon a literary pilgrimage to the Brontë sisters’ isolated Yorkshire home, British playwright Samantha Ellis asked herself several important questions. Who’s a better female role model, Catherine Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? Why did Jo March and Anne Shirley apparently quit writing? In a life modeled on classic authors from Jane Austen to Margaret Mitchell, how much is truly her own? Seeking answers, Ellis returns to her beloved library, and rediscovers the controversies of literary womanhood.

Ellis combines literary criticism and intimate memoir to tell her own story, which, unpacked from its context, proves not her own. For Ellis, books aren’t artistic creations or cultural artifacts. Where too many academic critics treat literature scientifically, like some distant tribe they research dispassionately, Ellis has cozy relationships with her books. She allows literature to transform her, and she in turn transforms her literature; Laura Ingalls and Lady Lazarus become inextricably part of her.

Growing up amid London’s close-knit, often insular immigrant Jewish community, books form Ellis’s connection to larger society. Starting with literature’s established canon, mostly British with generous samplings of American and Commonwealth, she incrementally molds herself on fictional templates: rebellious wives, headstrong daughters, tempestuous women, unconventional girls. Where her community imposes standards of religious and cultural conformity upon her, she seeks adventure, glamour, satisfaction. She chases what, in books, appears to come easily to her heroines.

Her relationships with books resemble relationships with people. She embraces them, struggles with them, learns from them, and—to her constant chagrin—eventually she outgrows them. Just as with friends, our relationships with books change us, revealing our options to us, teaching us to view other people more completely, guiding us to understand ourselves better. Thus, though her books have the same words, in the same order, as yours, each one is unique to her.

“I’m beginning to think all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time,” Ellis writes, explaining her supposed misreading of EM Forster’s A Room With a View. But this line echoes forward and back throughout this book. Giddy childhood friendships with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, or LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, soured when both heroines, to please overbearing patriarchal husbands, flatly quit writing.

Samantha Ellis

Sadly, each stage of growing up brings new disillusionments. The heroines of childhood, created by broadly Victorian authors like Frances Hodgson Burnett and LM Montgomery, don’t survive Ellis’s teenage transition to social consciousness. An astonishing range of literary sexual temptations, from Judy Blume to Jilly Cooper, challenge her parents’ chaste authority. Fellow Cambridge alum Sylvia Plath carries Ellis through college, but becomes an albatross afterward. Each life stage’s charming mythology falls away with each evolution.

But Ellis also rediscovers why these heroines matter as adults—just because she’s written these ideas down doesn’t mean they’ve become fixed. Only as an adult does Ellis finish reading Alcott’s novels, and learn that Jo March vetoed her husband and resumed writing. Rereading Plath after adult-onset seizure disorder colored her life, she realizes Esther Greenwood isn’t heroic because she suffers; she’s heroic because she perseveres. Reading, like love, is a constant process of reinvention.

Diverse readers may find Ellis’ experience very particular. Despite her aggressively international reading selections, her story is intensely British, intensely Jewish, intensely female. As a literary critic, she doesn't indulge illusions of thematic transcendence or proclaim erudite judgements as “death of the author” or “chain of signifiers.” Ellis isn’t an academic; she writes about writers to make them clearer, to herself if nobody else. I contend her particularity, her personal approach, makes her truly universal.

Not that she’s averse to scholarly criticism. Alongside her love affair with novels, Ellis describes consciousness-raising encounters with Germaine Greer, Susie Orbach, and other feminist revisionists who influence her outlook. Once she discovers the tools to read favorite novels more critically, she discovers unexamined implications that frequently run so horrifying, I remember twice reeling back from Ellis’s text, moaning “holy shit.” Ellis also learns that literature sometimes counters critics; it’s okay to argue with scholars.

Books, like Swann’s famous macaroon, have powerful psychic abilities. Cracking the spine on some childhood favorite instantly transports you back to that moment, that period of your development, your ideas and hopes and loves. Ellis relives her life, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes ruefully, through the novels which once enlivened her. The result is sometimes shocking, but always honest. And, in examining her journey through a lifetime’s greedy reading, she encourages us to revisit our journey, too.

Why Do Children Lie About Reading?

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 39
Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Maria Tatar, a professor of German who has worked heavily in German-language fairy tales, became curious about the phenomenon of “bedtime stories.” The idea of reading children into sleepiness makes little sense; she writes: “Nothing keeps you awake like a good story.” How, then, do children consume stories? Given access to books, kids read voraciously, tell one another stories, play make-believe, and enact impromptu plays. Stories are endemic to childhood.

Children find themselves pulled between conflicting forces, the eat-your-spinach wholesome reading grown-ups demand, and the deep, sensory experiences of stories they actually seek. As Tatar notes, children read with great aplomb, disappearing into books because they love the experience. And “experience” certainly describes it: kids embrace books that create rich sensory detail and muscular action. Children have opportunities to enjoy reading as grown-ups, with jobs and mortgages and responsibilities, cannot.

Presumably, the reading experience, which elides unnecessary content, feels more real and intense than ordinary life, with its long, inactive stretches of workaday banality. Children, who lack lived experiences, become seasoned through their stories. Because reading lets us experience a range of pleasures—different identities, different time periods, different nations—we absorb it deeply, particularly when we don’t have conflicting ideas or pressures attempting to limit and control our thoughts.

Knowing this, Tatar’s overview of pre-Twentieth Century “children’s literature” is downright chilling. In Tatar’s telling, adult scholars once sought to stifle children’s curiosity, numb their desire for experience, and reduce kids to mere moral instruments. Not for nothing did teachers foist “primers” on kids, a learning apparatus first devised for monastic devotion. The enthusiasm, joy, and wonder we associate with childhood, teachers once unabashedly strove to squelch.

Tatar lavishes praise upon writers like JM Barrie, of Peter Pan fame, or Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll, grown-ups who didn’t have children of their own. Freed from responsibility for children’s moral upbringing, they immerse themselves in what it means to be young. Carroll’s colorful, nigh-psychedelic otherworld, and Barrie’s adventurous utopia, transcend age, era, and nation. No wonder their Victorian fairy stories retain massive, imitative popularity generations later.

Consider the “literature” adults insist children should consume. From the highly moralistic parables in elementary schoolrooms, to the belletristic art writing favored in high school and college courses, it’s hard to imagine writing more incisively designed to alienate avid readers. Twenty-some years removed from 11th Grade English, I’ve finally begun appreciating Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s true accomplishments; but reading because we’re “supposed to” generates a dry, joyless experience.

No wonder authors frequently dismissed as “young adult” writers, like JK Rowling and Suzanne Collins, have dedicated adult audiences. Their immersive storytelling is essentially bilingual, having both the sensory, theatrical content children love (and adults too, if we’re honest), and the subtlety and nuance adults seek. Seven-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds, and seventy-year-old can all lose themselves in Harry Potter, while having unique, sophisticated experiences appropriate to their age range.

Yet, in perhaps Tatar’s most telling passages, children feel openly guilty about reading. Besides her own students, Tatar cites influential sources, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robin Williams, on this duality: making and consuming stories is children’s greatest joy, but we mock “introverts,” “addicts,” and “bookworms” for reading. Some never outgrow this. Tatar quotes Oprah Winfrey recounting her mother berating her for “think[ing] you’re better than the other kids.”

No wonder adults shift reading energies onto other tasks. From work addiction to family responsibility to even just reading books they “ought to” read, adults divert their attention to putatively useful purposes. Yet Tatar notes adults read to children, at least partly, to recapture that intense “theatre for the imagination” they remember from childhood. I suggest grown-ups read paperback romances and spy thrillers (essentially grown-up fairy tales) for similar purpose.

Tatar recaptures the way we read during our childhood, seeking sophisticated experience and sensory richness, not intellectual heft. Whether society steals it (as I believe) or our psyches cannot generate images internally anymore (as Tatar implies), we adults lose this pleasure in reading, and spend years of adulthood second-guessing ourselves. We intellectually seek meaningful themes and critical complexity, while longing to simply vanish into somebody’s lavishly felt story.

Stories, Tatar declares, create the experience of childhood. Between the sensory pleasure of Wonderland, and the complex experiences kids only have vicariously, childhood remains the unique domain of stories. And while Tatar doesn’t craft a writing guide for children’s literature, nor a discursus on adulthood reading, her message lies behind every grown-up’s reading experience. We spend adulthood seeking to rediscover that wonderful, magical story.

The Best of 2013, Part Two

See also Part One.

July: Twilight of the Godlings

Novelist Jason Hough certainly didn’t invent the idea that humanity is in an evolutionary bottleneck. But his debut novel, The Darwin Elevator, dramatizes this concept literally: due to incomprehensible alien influences, humanity can only survive in a narrow radius around Darwin, Australia. As resources become scarce, and humanity’s survival teeters, survival hangs on bands of scavengers, while zombies besiege humanity’s last redoubt.

Hough distills several post-9/11 motifs into one trilogy. Science fantasy fans will recognize shades of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and The Walking Dead, among others. In so doing, he epitomizes much of America’s current plight. Clinton-era malaise, of the X-Files variety, no longer suffices; we’ve transitioned to active, blood-spitting desperation. Thankfully, in these critical times, emergent heroes refuse to embrace the easy numbness of despair.

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August: Slow Death as the Son Becomes the Father

Jonathan Gillman grew under his powerful father’s disapproving gaze. An accomplished pianist and mathematician, Gillman’s father had worldwide acclaim. He also had incipient Alzheimer’s disease. My Father, Humming, Gillman’s first collection of verse describes the turmoil his family underwent as this former genius descended into ignominious senility. Refusing contemporary poetry’s often opaque flourishes, Gillman uses verse to strip his experience to its rawest, most heartfelt honesty, free from self-seeking airs.

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September: If Life's a Stage, Then All School is Acting Class

Trained as an English teacher, Lou Volpe never anticipated a life in theatre. But when Levittown, Pennsylvania, crumpled during the 1970s, Volpe took a chance on a struggling school’s drama program. While everything else collapsed, lacking outside help or funds, Volpe turned Truman High’s theatre into his town’s hope for the future. Children of the Rust Belt believed, sometimes for the first time, that their lives could truly matter.

Volpe’s former student Michael Sokolove returns to his alma mater in Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater. Sokolove pitches a powerful counter-narrative to current jeremiads of school decline, demonstrating that dedicated teachers, bolstered by supportive communities, can give youth direction even in the poorest hometowns. And he proves that, amid today’s math-and-science mania, fine arts mean something greater.

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October: Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Michael Sokolove, above, openly mocks the impersonal, test-driven education system that obtains in America today. He’d appreciate The Best American Essays 2013, a collection of personal writing in which twenty authors struggle with today’s widespread problems and joys. This collection challenges audiences to step outside themselves, understanding that only the intensely personal is ever truly universal. I’ve used prior Best American collections in writing classes, and will surely do so again.

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November: Snowpacked Mystic

Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli didn’t publish her first book until she was 62 years old. Since then, she’s won numerous awards, been feted by poetry’s elite, and received generous recognition at home and away as one of today’s great unrecognized poets. No wonder: her verse reflects decades of experience, but lacks the hip cynicism burdening too many seasoned poets. This makes her prime reading for non-poetry audiences.

Fargnoli’s sixth collection, Winter: Poems, examines active life from isolation’s enforced leisure. (New England regularly gets snowed in.) Her panoply of love lyrics, agnostic prayers, and solemn laments melds across pages, and years, to create a landscape of joy and loss. I couldn’t put it better than to quote myself: “Fargnoli’s Winter is bleak, ghostly, and alone. Yet it brims with life, because humans inject themselves into the vacuum.”

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December: Eternity Runs in the Blood

If American society has a new frontier, it must surely be the human genome. Our growing knowledge of biological inheritance threatens to transform medicine, childbearing, marriage, and other keys to human community. While scientists have written copious data-driven studies, the human story remains appallingly unheard. Editor Amy Boesky aims to change that with The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity.

Cable news and populist politicians have presented genetic research as inhumane, eugenicist, and possibly Nazi. These essays, by ordinary but eloquent genetic illness sufferers and their families, reframe the debate in ways that will hopefully move important discussions into the Twenty-First Century. Because genetic illnesses, fundamentally, aren’t about genes; they’re about how humans live in a scientific era.

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2013 was a literary mixed bag. January sucked so bad that I actually apologized for the entire month. Yet highlights like these remind me that books and reading remain vitally important. Here’s wishing you a smart, literate, satisfying 2014.

eSpelling

I first encountered the term “email” in a Freshman Composition textbook, in an essay by digital journalism pioneer Michael Kinsley. Not that I’d never encountered the concept before. By 1999, when I started college late, digital communications were busily revolutionizing how people communicated, allowing people to send text-based communications internationally, but also giving junk advertisers unprecedented access to ordinary citizens’ information.

No, I understood the idea of “email.” The orthography, however, took me by surprise. I’d always written it “e-mail,” emphasizing the separate pronunciation of the first syllable, /ē’-māl/. Kinsley’s spelling made the word look like it should be pronounced /ə-māl’/, with the emphasis on the second syllable. It resembled the common French name Emile, more than anything electronically analogous to the Post Office, which I still religiously used back then.

This digitally motivated shift in English orthography has not been entirely even. The corporate name Google has become a lower-case verb because of Google’s overwhelming market presence, and because English needed such a word. The comic strip character Barney Google probably helped ease us into saying “to google” when we needed to search the Internet. Yet the spelling of “to google” remains entirely consistent with preceding English language.

Not that Kinsley holds domain on spelling. The MLA Stylesheet, and other print-based usage guides, favor “e-mail,” the spelling that still seems most consistent with pronunciation to me. The Stack Exchange, a linguistics website, indicates that my preferred spelling remains more widely used. Yet the AP Stylebook changed its standards in 2011, now favoring “email” for journalists online and in print. As go journalists, so, probably, will go the vernacular.

Linguists agree that English is probably the hardest language for second-language learners to savvy. Its frequent borrowings from other languages create lopsided spelling shifts, as a word from French may align with another from Japanese, all arranged in an essentially German grammar. Advancing digital technology only compounds this confusion, because we aren’t borrowing from a real language. We lack any precedent for how to spell or organize new words.

Only that initial vowel, usually e or i, has changed how we write. We absorb inconsistencies with remarkable ease: for instance, we’ve never decided how to describe commerce occurring in an entirely digital format. Do we call it “e-commerce,” “ecommerce,” or “eCommerce”? My computer’s digital spell-check accepts the first and third options, but balks at the second, though it had no problem with how I wrote “email” earlier.

Trade names ease some of this confusion. Brands like iShares, iPad, or eBay have easily pronounceable names, because the offset capital letter emphasizes the initial vowel’s separate status. Nobody seriously expects to shop on /ə-bā’/, using an /’i-pæd/. Yet the capital letter doesn’t just steer pronunciation; it also signals these terms’ identity as wholly owned brand names. Nobody “owns” email, though it has many providers, so it won’t get capitalized.

Even the brand-name workaround doesn’t always work. E*Trade is pronounced much like email, yet the Wal-Mart-ish asterisk creates an entirely new orthography, separate from email or eBay. It’s hard to say how seriously to take this, however, since the company still formally organized as “E-Trade Financial Corporation.” The asterisk may be a mere stylistic flourish invented by advertisers. Mercifully, few others have mimicked it so far.

Electronic books may only compound this inconsistency. Not only do we have no agreed means of describing these products (e-books? ebooks? eBooks?), but the large and growing number of programming formats means that books written in one form, Kindle for instance, are unreadable in other formats, like iPad or Kobo. Authors’ surface orthography proves only the tip of the readability iceberg, and people favoring one format develop their own dialect.

While e-book entrepreneurs frantically try to invent new formats, they strive to keep them compatible with old formats, like HTML and PDF. Thus English retains its single shared past, when computers had to be compatible or they’d be useless; but it cruises toward a divided future. The market will certainly shake out certain formats (Rocket yBooks still exist, for instance, but only vestigially). But new technology will hasten new confusions.

English has never had an institution like L'Académie Française, which regulates and purifies French. We’ve never needed or wanted such an institution, and its lack keeps English adaptable to changing times. Yet technology’s rapid and accelerating shifts mean we’ll face new ideas and applications daily. Without mutual standards for new, tech-based language, English will only become harder and more opaque. Earth’s most widespread language deserves such a backstop.

The Joy of Middles and Unfinished Ends

Lloyd Alexander

I discovered fantasy literature as a kid when I read Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Derived from Welsh myth, and utilizing the episodic story structure of The Mabinogion, Alexander created an arc in which the dreams all children share (what if my destiny looms larger than my circumstances?) come true for one youth. Though laced with magic and adventure, these elements really matter mainly as they help our hero discover his true adult identity.

The first four volumes each ended with the promise that the story would continue. The hope of more, that somehow this epic could unfold in any direction. So it came as a shock when the end came. Narnia ended, I felt, when the story had played itself out, but Prydain wasn’t done. Alexander even made that plain in his explanation that more took place after the final chapter. We just didn’t get to see it. The story was done, and all the possibilities closed down.

This was the first time I spotted a reality that eventually became the largest concept in my treasury of literary axioms: middles are the best part of any book. I will go to the mat with you on any book you name. Beginnings carry the need to explain character, situation, and conflict, while endings have the burden of putting a bow on all those concepts. Middles simply revel in untrammeled possibility. When we imagine books we love, we always recall the middle.

Since I’ve already mentioned fantasy, consider Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Though arguably the Twentieth Century’s most influential book, it lags in both the early and late chapters. Tolkein felt the need for such intricate introductions and explanations that the Council of Elrond runs nearly as long as some entire novels. And observe how filmmaker Peter Jackson elided Tolkein’s long, talky denouement. Only the middle doesn’t suffer from either scene-setting or resolution.

Joseph Conrad

If you want a more mainstream example, consider Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, acknowledged classics both, present us with lush stories that probe at the inner recesses of the human soul. They also don’t so much resolve as peter out. By his own admission, Conrad had difficulty writing endings, but this didn’t stop him feeling the need to close every door he opened. Thus these masterworks sputter in the final pages.

Many classic writers understood this truth, and thus didn’t try to enforce pat endings. Shakespeare left so many doors open in Hamlet that uncounted authors have tried to write sequels. What happened to Horatio and Fortinbras after the final curtain? What happened to the state of Denmark after every claimant to the throne killed every other claimant? The very unsolved nature of these questions gives it power.

Unfortunately, most sequels have been undisputed stinkers. I blame the authors’ evident need to solve every debate definitively. Only Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which butters its bread with existential ambiguity and, if anything, asks even more questions, merits our time. Nor is this problem unique to Shakespeare; consider all the authors who write sequels to the Odyssey or Pride and Prejudice—and how few are actually are worth reading.

Shakespeare, Homer, and Austen knew that, if they left important plot threads open, we would write our own stories. Even if we don’t literally put pen to paper, we tell stories to ourselves. We ask questions, we speculate on possibilities, and we put ourselves into the shoes of our favorite protagonists. We make meaning not from the completion of every concept the authors put on the page, but in the ability to join the story, which we can only do if the story remains open.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Based on that, I will make one exception to my axiom about middles. Perhaps you’ve thought of favorite stories that only ramp up in the final pages, like Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust, or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. All these books have earned their reputation over the course of generations, even millennia. And they share one common trait: all three were left incomplete at their authors’ deaths. They don’t have endings, only middles.

Perhaps that’s why ongoing series novels dominate the current publishing domain. Maybe audiences like middles so much that they want stories to hang on. Though one particular conflict may resolve, our characters’ arcs remain intact, and continue to live in a world where anything can happen. Because we want to believe anything can happen in our world, as Lloyd Alexander taught me to hope so many years ago.

Working Class Values, Part Two

PART ONE: SHARING, BELLYACHING, AND SLOGANEERING

4. READING. In graduate school, one of my writing professors discused the large subset of the publishing industry dedicated to books for “people who don’t read very much.” She characterized romances, thrillers, and the kind of novels sold at drugstores as “books people can fall asleep under.” Though my professor surely meant no malice in describing unchallenging books, her description is not just wrong, it’s potentially harmful.

Of the many myths and caricatures that stick to the working class, none does more harm than the idea that they don’t read. Nothing could be further from the truth; many read committedly. Some read far more than the economic elites who would put them down. But they don’t read what literary scholars say they should read. And they don’t define their lives around which books they consider most worth their time.

English professors claim that “good” books challenge, unsettle, and expand their readers. “Mere” pop literature earns their disdain because it holds no such promise for its audience. Such professors openly mock the authors who sell the most books to the largest audiences, like Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Danielle Steele, and James Patterson. These assembly line authors crank out books to quickly and often to count as “real” literature.

If speed and repetition disqualify authors from the heights of Parnassus, then the converse should also be true, and Johnathan Franzen, who requires ten years to polish and publish just one book, would be the greatest living American author. Some literary critics seem eager to crown him as such. Yet many of my factory peers have no idea who Franzen is, and when told, look unimpressed at the paces he puts himself through.

Working class readers want to be entertained, uplifted, made to laugh, cry, scream. They do not want to feel confused by language, situations, and manners alien to their experience. Thus many books which scholars tell us we should read, whether acknowledged classics or cutting edge new releases, simply zoom by working class readers. Many blue collar workers can finesse a novel in one night, but get told it doesn’t really count.

This essentially colonial attitude toward working class reading habits results in marked anti-intellectualism. If brainy types devalue blue collar reading, then blue collar readers can’t be bothered with intellectualism. During my factory orientation, the HR representative indicated one suite of offices to which we had no admittance. A woman behind me sneered: “That’s where the people with college degrees work.”

I chose not to reply that I, too, have a college degree. It’s just as well I didn’t, since I now know about a quarter of my factory colleagues have at least one degree, and some, like me, have graduate degrees. Yet this disdain for intellectuals is not about me, or any individual, as people. Rather, many workers see intellectuals, rightly or wrongly, as the ones holding back their economic potential.

This results in reading as a compartmentalized activity for many in the working class. They read at home, and they work at work. Looking around the breakroom, you would not see so much as a magazine or newspaper. Breaktime is for talking, which is where real information transactions occur. I’ve seen peers completing crossword puzzles in their cars, but they leave the paper behind when they enter the factory.

Blue collar orality is famous among those who study such things. When trying new tasks, somebody like me might naturally reach for a book; but workers prefer to teach skills through oral explanation and mimicry. This apprenticeship arrangement, which may last minutes for simple tasks, or years for a body of knowledge, fills the role scholars and white collar professionals associate with school and book learning.

That said, nobody bothers me about bringing books to read on my own breaktime. Recently, two peers saw me reading the prerelease edition of a mystery due out later this month. Both became very excited, asking me questions and talking about books they’ve enjoyed recently. In other words, though they wouldn’t read on the job themselves, they were able to have a group bonding moment around my reading.

One last note on working class reading. I have never seen my factory peers with a Kindle or other reading device. Though I’ve seen at least two workers with tablet computers, they use these to store and play music or movies. My peers cannot be bothered to pay good money for a gee-whiz gadget to do what the public library lets them do for free.

PART THREE: RELIGIOSITY AND EGALITARIANISM