The Problem with Fantasy

When I was growing up, I read only fantasy and science fiction, and science fiction was really more in the way of filler, to be consumed when fantasy wasn't available. It's not that I didn't like science fiction, it's just that my mind was shaped to fit Lord of the Rings by my obsessive readings of the same, and so I looked always for more of that sort of thing. The world is of course full of LotR knock offs and imitators, so I had no trouble finding them. In some sense, every writer of fantasy works in the building that Tolkien made. And that, I would say, is the greatest issue with fantasy.

Quick quiz: someone says they're reading a fantasy novel, but doesn't tell you anything else. What do you think about? Heroes going on a quest or fighting some evil, right? And what else? Kings and kingdoms, swords and horses, nobles in castles, grim forests and high snowy mountains. And all of that would be more right than wrong, because typically English-language fantasy exists in a very particular place: 14th century Northern Europe.

This is not exclusively or only true, mind you. There are writers like Guy Gavriel Kay who work with other settings (after starting as a Tolkien chronicler, no less). But most "innovative" fantasy involves twists and quirks on the 14CNE (14th Century Northern Europe) setting rather than something different. And the world is full of other inspirational options, from the very similar to the rather different.

Here's just a few very similar inspirations: Dark Ages Northern Europe with a rougher and more primitive feel; Medieval Space, sophisticated and complicated, warmer and sunnier; Medieval Russia, isolated and rural, superstitious and vast.

More distinct inspirations: Imperial China, scholarly and traditional, confident of superiority, rich with custom and with a viewpoint strikingly different; Medieval Japan, a nearly wild society with effete gentlemen and hidden ladies, derivative of other cultures but bizarrely innovative, poetic and beset by ghosts and demons; classical India, hierarchical and worldly, rich and innovative, absorbing other cultures.

And notions far-fetched from the 14CNE perspective: sub Saharan Africa, with tribes and chieftans, rituals and spirituality; pre-Columbian America, with so very many options, but an almost complete lack of the familiar domesticated animals and metalworks that help to define 14CNE; Tibet, a barely livable landscape of warring priests and demons haunted mountains, violent and vibrantly alive on the edge of survivability.

Taking any of those and building your fantasy setting from it would give you a notably different and much more unique starting point. Imagine, if you will, the Lord of the Rings taking place in pre-Columbian Central America; or Song of Ice and Fire in a world based off Fuedal Japan instead of Fuedal Europe; or Boneshaker set during the Taipeng Rebellion in China instead of the American Civil War. (Not that there's anything wrong with their current settings for any of them, mind you.)

The world's a big place. And while fantasy doesn't always (or even often) take occur in the world we know, there's no reason for it to stick so close to home as it does.

How to Be Slightly Inaccurate, Historically; and Why

I'm spending a lot of time trying to be a good person as a writer. I'm trying to make sure my writing is at least a little representative of the world as I'd like to have it. Stronger women, gentler men, more minorities, that sort of thing. It's not very hard to do, and not something that is often out of place. But there are moments when I grow a bit concerned, as with my current work in progress.

I'm writing historical dark fairy tale stuff, set in 16th Century rural Austria. Women had rather limited roles there and then, and so I'm reasonably limited in what I can have my female characters do. I know of course that women in real history did all sorts of remarkable things all the time: ruled countries, fought in battles, ran their estates, things that are often overlooked or forgotten. So I can have all that happen, but it doesn't seem like quite enough to me.

Then of course I think about the writing of the last century or two, by men especially. Where women seldom appeared in anything but a moral or supporting role, and did little or nothing of note for the story. Only in dramatic pieces could women be real characters, and then their actions were still strongly limited and curtailed. They might feel real, but they were just as evidently trapped, caged by society. And while this is predominantly historically true, it wasn't always so.

So I think about it, and I realize that if I just keep the characters interesting, and on the edge of the "historically" possible, I'm doing pretty well. I'll do more in other places, other works. History sets limits that can't really be contravened entirely, and I'm not going to. But I will make every effort to step right up to the boundary, and possible slip a toe across now and then. I'd feel bad if I did anything less, and like I was failing as a writer. It seems a small thing, but I have a platform, and I'd rather use it to try to change attitudes than to support a worn out status quo.

We Are Shaped By Where We Are

It's winter in my writing. The current project, I mean, not always. But as I look over my body of work, I do notice that there's a lot of rain, a lot of snow, a lot of cold weather and unpleasantness. It's not always the case, but it's winter far more often than it's summer. I don't know if it's because it's more dramatic than summer (which in general it is) or if it's just because of Seattle.

Not that it snows here much or often at all. But winter, as a concept, just keeps on going. From some time in October, most often, to some time in April, give or take, not much changes. It's chilly and wet and grey, and in general stays that way through the whole period. And I can only think that my writing mindset has been shaped by that, by the notion that it is always winter, that summer will be a brief and wonderful thing that vanishes completely and is almost forgotten.

So it's winter where I'm writing. And almost always will be, I think.

Ruff, Washington

I haven't posted for a long while. I blame two things: NaNoWriMo, and getting married. The latter took up way more time, and left me with precious little for anything else. But it's happened now, I have a husband, and that's wonderful.

This year for Thanksgiving I went to Eastern Washington to spend the day with the husband's family. His mother (and his uncle and aunts) were all born in a little spot of a place called Ruff (pronounced Roof), Washington. It's barely visible on maps. There are grain silos, a couple of streets, one house and several trailers. Almost everyone living there is a cousin of my husband, but that's not a lot of people, maybe a dozen. If Ruff was ever incorporated, no one seems to know about it.

It wasn't always like that, though. Once upon a time, there used to something like a real town there. In the teens of the last century, there was a Model T assembly plant which lasted for some years, and the town was host to a rail station of some note. There would have been a store or two, and housing for the people who worked in the plant, and probably a bar or a restaurant. There was certainly a ten room hotel, which lasted into the 70s though not as a commercial operation; instead, my husband's mother and her siblings grew up in it, moving from room to room as the mood took them, with their parents hosting massive parties in the huge, dilapidated building. I don't know when everyone had moved out by, but it couldn't have been later than about 1975 or so. The building lasted a while longer, in an ever more ruinous state, before finally being torn down maybe 20 years ago. No one seems certain about when exactly that happened. If you look at the map, you can still see the vague ruins of the building on the corner of Main and W3.

Towns like this used to exist all over the rural areas of the nation, little places where local production and industry flared up before consolidation and better transportation did away with them. Probably there were a few hundred people in Ruff at one point, and a few hundred in dozens of similar places just in Washington that have since vanished off the map, mostly or entirely.

Another is Marlin, the "town" the was part of my husband's address when he was a little kid. It's part of a place called Krupp that changed its name during WWI, as Krupp was the name of Germany's biggest armaments firm. But it's still half Krupp and half Marlin, and both are listed on maps. Which is silly, as the place has only 60 people, the smallest incorporated community in Washington State. It's a speck, a spot on a map that you might not even find. There's a post office, left over from better days. There's not a gas station, from what I can tell, and there's no businesses at all beyond the P.O. Why there are still any people there, I can't guess. I suppose most of them work small farms, because that's the sort of area it's in. I suppose also that many of those people are children, who will move away to a big town like Moses Lake, or dream big and head to Seattle; or else fall into meth and boredom and linger on in their empty spaces.

We drove through dozens of little decaying places: Harrington and Wilbur and Hartline, Almira and Coulee City and others whose names I can't recall. Everything breaking down and vanishing, the old lovely houses replaced by trailers, the trailers replaced by empty fields littered with old rusty wreckage, the fields forgotten except for a little graveyard tucked away in an odd corner.

If there were more hills and hollows, it would all be well suited for horror, but the vistas are too open, the light too bright. I wonder what it would take to give some life back to these places, to make them attractive to people again. In this age when the internet brings the world to your home, I wonder that it doesn't promote more distant living. But at least near Ruff, it doesn't. It's lonely out there, and vast. All the little places are being swallowed up in the distance.

Happy Halloween

Halloween's on a Monday, to which I say boo in the jeering fashion, rather than the scaring. When I was a child, it never mattered what day was Halloween, of course: if it was a school day, you might wear your costume there, and then get home and have dinner, and then get to trick or treating as soon as it started to get the least bit dark. Monday was as good as any other day. But as a grown person, you like your holidays to fall on the weekend: Friday and Saturday are the best nights for parties, you know. I used to throw Halloween parties, but there's just too much that happens, and over the years, the number of events going on has only increased, so that two years ago we threw our last party for the biggest dress up occasion of the year. It was sad, but we had far too many people showing up for twenty minutes before they ran off to another party (often three or four more parties). End result was a party of fifteen people with five or eight wandering through at any moment. Not awful, or anything, but the parties I once threw were big productions, so Halloween quit being worth it.

Now I'm an old fuddy duddy, and I sit in my apartment and look down at the streets below, thronging with costumed revelers wandering about. I do not, myself, get dressed up, but then, since I was a child, I seldom have. And I rather hope that there's no knocking at our door tonight (I think there are no kids in our building, or at least, I've never seen one, so we may be okay) because we don't have any treats to give out. A bit of a grouchy curmudgeon, that's me these days.

Truly, though, I don't object. Happy Halloween, and all that. Enjoy it, if you're able to do so on a Monday, or if you already did over the weekend. I'll be sitting at home, having some dinner, probably watching Cabaret because Netflix sent it along. Inappropriate, I know. Maybe we'll dig up a horror movie we can watch instantly? 

Happy Halloween in any case.

A Thousand Words

Some time ago - all right, it wasn't that long, but bear with me here - I wrote the Great American Novel. It wasn't set in America, and it may or may not be great, but it was, in very fact, a novel. Weighing in at roughly 111,000 words, it's arguably quite a long novel for the Young Adult Fantasy genre.

I find myself bemused to note that the name of the novel, Grimme, is very close indeed to an eponymous television series that just began serialization: "Grimm." The TV show is all about someone who suddenly becomes aware that his many-times-great grandfather was one of the original Brothers Grimm and he must now go fight monsters (I paraphrase wildly, but you get the gist I'm sure). Strangely enough, this too is modestly close to the ideas touched on by my novel - not precisely, but not so far off either.

And yes, this leads to bemusement for me. Am I, as has been the case several times this year, tuned closely in to the spirit of the times? Does my muse whisper to me what will be popular next season? (Would that were the case!) Perhaps. But in this time I am reminded that there are relatively few truly original ideas left under the sun, perhaps none at all; and that it is how we execute those ideas that makes our writing worthy of being read. The "great stories" are all great exactly because they speak to something universal in human experience, so it is natural that we would go back to them again and again, seeking the truths they contain.

Perhaps that is the case with Grimme, and the new television show Grimm. Or perhaps not. But in the mean time, you are invited to feast your eyes on the lovely map drawn for the alterate-Europe setting of Grimme. Done by hand by the multi-talented Jason Vanhee, it uses archaic or non-English names for many of the regions of Europe. I'm quite pleased by it, and grateful that my writing cohort has such a rich store of artistic ability upon which I may occasionally draw. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case it will help me summarize over a hundred thousand words - and my gratitude is commensurate with that ratio.

Look for more Grimme developments soon!

Why Not Detroit?

Forty years ago, give or take a few years, New York City went through a wondrous renaissance. While there had always been artists there, the low rents and empty spaces, the vague element of danger and lawlessness, all made sure that Manhattan became the center of the arts in America. Fashion, photography, painting, music, writing, everything had a place in the city in those days, as artists were able to take a chance, move to the city because they could afford to, and scrape by until they either drifted home, or in a surprising number of cases made it big.

I speak only of Manhattan. Nobody in those days, I'm given to understand, went to the burroughs, or thought much of them. Only on the island was there much in the way of life and culture; the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens went on as working class sub cities, homes to immigrants and industry. While there were probably a few exceptions, the vast majority of the artistic rebirth in New York was concentrated between the Hudson and East Rivers.

Four decades on, New York is safe, prosperous and above all expensive. Not that there was ever a time when you couldn't find vastly pricey properties in Manhattan, and hugely high rents. But back in 1970, you could still also find broken down corners where no one went, where urban decay had taken hold, where you could get a big loft for a couple hundred dollars, or a rundown walkup apartment on the fifth floor of a rickety building. Now every spot in Manhattan is gentrified, expensive even if doesn't look it, and still somehow full of artists, now piled six deep in a tiny space fit for one, struggling to pay rent and eat in ways they never did before, unable to have a workspace except out in the very sub cities that were once shunned.

So what now? Articles are being written about how New York's creative boom years are ending, or already ended, because of the problems of rent and space. And perhaps there's no need for a city of artists any longer. The internet brings together writers, photographers, painters, designers, in ways that "mere" proximity never could, right?

Or wrong. There is nothing so stimulating to art as meeting with and talking to other artists, gathering and speaking together, looking over each other's work. There is nothing that makes art as possible as spaces for it to exist in, studios and theaters and galleries. New York for long and long has been that place, but it can be that place for at best a little time longer.

Why not Detroit, then? It might sound ridiculous. But examine the case. Detroit is in many ways very similar to Manhattan in the 60s: broken down, with crime and urban decay as massive concerns, population decline, cheap rents. It's a city ripe for rebirth. right now you can find places like this, slightly smaller than my apartment in Seattle and a third the price. This is for a city that, until a couple of decades ago, was the third largest in the nation, a proud and mighty metropolis.

I can hear the objections. It's Detroit! people will say, as if that matters. New York? They'll kill you! was what they said in in the Nixon years, and into the Reagan years even. People still went. Nobody wants to be the first, someone might say. Well, perhaps not. But there's a very attractive level of availability there, isn't there? Cheap rents, opportunities for everything, close proximity to the great outdoors (no, really) and to Canada (really? yes!). The climates even match pretty well: muggy and hot in summer, and chill and snowy in the winter.

Is this a real possibility? Can people go to Detroit, make it a city of art, and get it going as a reborn, growing city again? I don't know. But there's historical precedent, and there's no reason not to give it a shot. The place can use artists. As for me, I'm freakishly sensitive to weather change, being from Seattle, so I don't know that I could make it. But...it's tempting, isn't it? To try to be the explorers, the settlers, of a new place (an old place made new, in this case). What might not be accomplished.

Why not Detroit, then?

We Are The 99% (of writers)

I'm not talking about finance here. Or in a sense, I am. I'm talking about writers. And I am, Peter is, you are if you're reading this, one of the 99%. I can say this with confidence, because I know Stephen King isn't reading this; I know J. K. Rowling isn't reading this. We lowly working class writers, the ones who make little or no money, who can only dream of anything like success, we are the majority. The vast masses of those who work with words.

What does this have to do with protests, with opposition to Wall Street, with anything that would make it worthwhile to co-opt a slogan for a title? Well, the main thing is this: we all of us want things to change. And we none of us know exactly what we can make change. Do we have goals, do we have dreams, can we even, to some degree, express them? Of course. But there's nothing exactly we can do, right?

That's no more true for a working class writer than it is for a working class American, though. We can get out there and make some noise: call attention to ourselves and to others like us, try to shed some light on our problems and on our accomplishments. We can band together, because a group of voices can be heard more than one lone crier in the wild. We can hope for improvement, that we'll be heard and results will happen.

The odds of success seem slim, of course. But we each of us have some this far: we've written a book, or more than one. We've decided to put it out there. That's the hardest part. The rest is just luck, or fate, hard work or determination.

We'll never be the 1%. It's not going to happen. But we can, just maybe, succeed better than we might dream.

Successfully Faking It

Steamcon is coming up in a couple of weeks. Both Peter and I will be there doing a talk about ebooks and Steampunk, which I feel perfectly comfortable doing, as it's focusing in large part on ebooks. I know that topic pretty well now. Somehow it grew into me being an actual pro at the convention, though. I don't mind being a pro: you get a nicer badge, and access to the greenroom, and you're in the program if all has gone well. That's all kind of neat. It's been a while since I pro'ed at a con, like more than a decade of a while, but the process seems to be almost unchanging. The real problem comes in the fact that it was needful for me to sign up to do more panels (wait, they expect me to work?) and thus, I need to fake it.

Panels are great: people who know a thing or two talking about that thing for interested audiences. The problem arises when the audience (Steampunk enthusiasts) knows more than the panelists (me, in this case, a Steampunk dabbler, interested in the topic but really not deeply sunk into it.) I tried to pick panels that I at least knew something about, mostly from a historical perspective rather than a genre one, and that's worked out okay. But as so often occurs in ordinary life, I'm now obliged to fake it. Fake knowledge that I halfway possess; fake confidence that I should be up in front of people many of whom are more gifted and talented than me; fake ability to moderate a panel involving just me and this guy. So that's a problem.

On the other hand, I'm a writer. A writer of fiction, no less. My job is to fake it: to make it seem like I grasp what it's like to be in the 18th Century, or a woman, or slowly dying of blood loss. Or even to live in a city other than Seattle, which is about all the experience I have in that particular field. And I think I do pretty well in that regard. This is just the same thing, for an hour, with help, in front of people who will drift in and out of rooms as their level of interest and boredom dictates. Not even necessarily interest and boredom in me and what I'm talking about in a panel, either. I've walked out of perfectly good panels because I thought maybe there was something else going on. So it's easy, I know that. Easy to fake it, easy to put out an impression of knowledge, of competence. And really, I'm not underqualified or anything, I just know there are very expert persons attending who aren't panel participants at all, and never will be, and it makes me feel a bit of a fake all the same.

Doesn't matter though. I'm committed now. So let's get to the fakery. I suppose the night before, I'll have to be a busy bee at writing something different and odd, so that I really feel successful at making it up as I go along. But that's all right. It's what I do. It's what all writers do.

See you at the con. I'll be smiling, real or not. Hopefully by that point, it'll be hard to tell.

A Very Short Record Heatwave

Seattle, where I live, is not a city noted for heat. Or cold. Or anything weather wise but clouds and slow steady rain. This is unjust, in that normally we have the best summers imaginable: long sunny days where the sky is punctuated by light clouds and breezes from the Sound, going on and on for months. This summer was an exception, and we have labored, most days, under hazy clouds, or with "highs" in the upper 60s. It has been a long, dull season. Until September came in, that is. Suddenly we had a summer, for a bit more than a week at least: 9 days with temperatures over 80. This may not seem like much, but it pretty much beats all the rest of 2011, and it bested our longest streak of over 80 in September by 1 day.

This would be completely unworthy of mention except that I use a laptop to get work done. It's not a big thing, and it's pretty efficient and all that, but there's the problem that as I use it, it produces heat. Heat that just accumulates, and makes my already reasonably toasty apartment become more and more unbearable. I would have just set it aside more often this last week, and not worried about it, only it is crunch time here in Kindling Press Land, when we try our damnedest to get the 20001 Anthologie ready to go in time for the planned launch date of 9/14/11. And we're almost there, but it took me working more time with a hot computer near me, or on me, than I would have liked.

Today, blessed cool has returned. But by now, I'm almost done. I've got maybe an hour or two of work left. And I'm not going to be upset to do that work in the cooler weather, of course. But I wish that if the weather had to get hot, it had done it around our schedule. I mean, this anthologie, it's a big deal, right?

What makes a classic?

In discussing "girls' books" last week, I mentioned that The Diary of Anne Frank is a classic that probably should be read by everyone. But that led me to think about classics, and what they are, and how they get to be that way.

There's a first, easy definition. Classics were once those books that survived the so-called Dark Ages, the works of Greek and Latin writers that managed to come into the light of the Renaissance and the modern era. If one were reading a classic once upon a time, it was Aristotle, or Galen, or Xenophon, or Tacitus. That was it. There were no other options. Chaucer and Dante and the Venerable Bede may have been around a while, but they were not classics. So this, I think, provides us with our first criteria: a classic is a book which has been around a while, possibly even a book from another era or age.

With that in place, we can eliminate all the "instant classics" that blurbs constantly mention. When someone proclaims say, Franzen's Freedom or Stoddard's The Help to be a classic, it should rightly be viewed as nothing but nonsensical hyperbole. I understand, of course, that blurbs are in general nonsense; I understand that even if not just given as a favor or in haste, the use of the word classic is meant to evoke the possibility, more than declare the certainty. Still, the word is thrown around too much for very recent works. What is needed is some age, certainly. To my mind, a classic cannot be thought so until the world has changed enough that people are reading it in a different mindset than when it was written. So at least a generation, I would think. And a full generation, 25 or 30 years. Which means that House of Leaves isn't a classic yet, nor Infinite Jest. Perhaps in time. Perhaps.

Time, then, is the first marker. But it is not the only one. In his day, Winston Churchill was a best selling novelist. He wrote a great number of books roughly a hundred years ago that were very well received and sold truckloads. Or wagonloads, it being the very beginning of automated travel. Yet not a one of them will you find on a book store shelf these days, except if you stumble upon a very old and worn used copy in some dark corner of musty shelving. His fiction though terribly popular has vanished almost without a trace. So age in itself is obviously not enough, when big novels from only a century ago cannot by any stretch be called classics.

What else, then? I think it's important, vital even, to write for the ages. Not that you need to be thinking of the future, and what readers in a century or two will be interested in. But that your stories need to be meaningful not just to whoever is reading them on the second Thursday of May in your current year, but in any year. Stories about real people, doing real things. Of the original classics, the Greeks and Romans, most have faded from memory. They are available, of course, if only in the Loeb Classical Library series, but they don't turn up in class reading lists, and no one has heard of them except specialists. But Euripides and Seutonius and the like are certainly still classics, and Homer is the granddaddy of classic authors. I can only assume it is because they still speak to us, even two or three millennia later, while no one much reads Sextus Empirius or Frontinius.

A simple way to write for the ages is to the be the first at something. This brings us Homer, and Euripides, and Herodotus. But it brings us also Lady Murasaki, and Cervantes, and Aphra Behn. But that's not always the case. Dr. Polidori, who was Byron's lover, wrote probably the first vampire novel. But who remembers it nowadays? No the vampire novel we all recall is Dracula, and that's the classic in the field. Again, it is because Stoker spoke to us in a way that still feels relevant, and Polidori did not, nor any of the handful that came between the two. But one could argue there are other classic vampire novels. Anne Rice is a contender, certainly. Twilight, one assumes, will not make the cut, but only time will make that clear.

So time is needed, and originality is a strong factor. Yet original works of great age have vanished time and again, preserved in the memory of scholars but otherwise ignored. Which brings me to the third and most obscure factor: dumb luck. It all starts with the real classics, and the dumb luck that brought them to us. We assume these were the best books of their time, because it is all we have. Yet there were thousands more, hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Fire and water and age and ignorance and willful hatred destroyed them all. Some were scraped clean to copy out Bibles onto; some were burned for warmth; some were just forgotten in dusty corners until they could no longer be read. Certainly one or two of those would be among the greatest works of the Classical Period, probably more than just one or two. Yet we'll never know what we're missing. Ill chance has taken them away from us.

But there's more than that. There's the fickle taste of the public. Chance will bring one book to the forefront, and another will vanish rapidly. While being a best seller is no measure of quality, few books that failed to sell have made it to be a classic. This is why some authors have only one classic book, or at least, less than their output. But all of Austen, and all of Dickens, even with his massive output, tend to be counted as classics. So there's no way to be sure.

I know that sounds like a copout. What makes a classic, he asks, and then answers himself with, I have no real idea. But it's true. I can point to some factors: time, quality, relevance. But I cannot say that there is a formula. I can tell a classic when I see one, but I cannot tell why it is so. Even adding up the skill of the writing, the reception that managed to let the work move forward at all, the luck and chance that kept it going, I cannot.

What is a classic? It is a book we have read, we are reading, we will read. It is something that tells us who we are, and why we are, and how we are. But it's something more than that which can't be named. It is a wonder and a mystery. I wish I knew, not so that I could write one (though that would be very nice, of course) but so that I could know what I should read. What they will be reading, in fifty years, in a hundred, when I'm dead and gone to dirt. What will the future remember of us, what books will tell them who we all were? I wish I knew that.

People speak of the death of books. It will not happen. They will change, books. But they will live on so long as we wonder at the past, at ourselves, at where we are headed. Classics can tell us that, and little else can.

One of my many writing deficiencies, discussed

I don't really write series. I'm not built for it as a writer, I don't think. I have difficulty constructing and working with very long narratives. In truth, I like things short and lean and sleek, and a series aims for the opposite. As a reader, however, I like them well enough. I've torn through massive multivolume epics time and again, from my first great literary love The Lord of the Rings on to more modern fare like Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen. But in the main I agree strongly with this article, in that it's all too easy to go astray. A Game of Thrones is doing it; the Wheel of Time did it but might somehow still be salvaged (though I doubt it), and the Malazan series, clocking in at 10 books, should have stopped at 8. But I keep trying them, keep reading them and seeing if a writer can make it work. There are successes, yes, but I think they only work if they clock in at about three books; almost anything more manages to muddle things up. Perhaps some day I'll be bold or foolish enough to give it a try myself; I've had a notion here and there, but the execution always so far has failed me. If I do, though, I'll stick with tradition, and just do three books. Three is plenty.

The troubling topic of "girls' books"

It is a long established belief in the book industry that girls will read books with boys as main characters, but not the reverse. While not entirely true, in my experience both as a reader and as a bookseller of more than a decade, it's pretty much accurate. Girls, for reasons which can only be guessed at, do not mind boys as the heroes; boys on the other hand often actively avoid books with female protagonists, even if they're the sort that do "boy" things, like fighting and adventuring. All of which leads to the idea that while there is only a small set of "boys' books", there is a very large set of "girls books". 

"Boys' books" are such things as sports based fiction, which don't have much crossover appeal. Other than that rather small ghetto of literature, there isn't much that girls don't get to. On the other hand, there is a vast sea of "girls' books", including a great number of quite famous and perennially popular books that few boys ever read. I speak of such titles as Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret; the entire Ramona Quimby series; the Little House books in all their numbers and varieties; the extraordinarily plentiful American Girl series; and perhaps the largest and most famous of the them all, The Diary of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank's book is a peculiar case. It is not a novel, as the rest are. It is a work that examines an interesting and critical period in history from a crucial perspective. It is (as are many of the books listed above) a classic work, assigned in schools across the country. And yet, other than those school assignments, you will seldom if ever find a boy reading the book.

Recently, the employees at the Kids' Desk in my store made up lists of the their top ten books for kids. Everyone at the desk made one up, as did a good number of other employees. Almost all the people at the kids' desk are women, one of those things that just happens, and every one of them, I believe, put The Diary of Anne Frank on their list. Most often in the top five, even. Of the men who participated, not a one of us did. Not anywhere on the list at all. And most of us had never even read the book. Yet I can't deny that it would be a worthy book to read (I was among those who hadn't read it). It would inform us of things. It would reveal a part of the world. But I haven't, and the other men hadn't. And why?

Boys don't read that, was my answer. I could give no more reason than that. I didn't need to give more of a reason; it was like saying rain fell down from the clouds, or gravity pulls things toward each other. It is something that can be observed, and is generally speaking true, and thus does not need to be investigated. All the women were shocked at my statement, but it wasn't incorrect. Boys don't read that. We just don't. We don't read Little House, we don't read the Click, we don't read (much) even so big a thing as Twilight. We just don't. They are stories, we recognize, for girls, for women, but not for us boys. We know this without thought.

It's a shame that we know this. It limits us as readers. Not that I think we should read Pretty Little Liars (I don't really think anyone should read that), but that we should, more of us at least, read Laura Ingalls Wilder. We should more of us read the Brontes. We should, perhaps, even try to find out what makes Twilight tick for so many women of all ages. And we should certainly read The Diary of Anne Frank.

 But we don't. And we won't. And there is something problematic and troubling about that. I don't have a solution. I only know there is a problem.