Seventy-Five Book That All Males Should Read

Yesterday afternoon I took a break from reading and making notes for a review and messed around online for a bit. While on Twitter, author Ian Sales tweeted the following: "sigh. apparently starting up sf mistressworks is incompatible with liking books written by men: http://is.gd/r15GY8." I followed the link and read the comment, which I found to be simultaneously defensive, snide, and patronizing. Not hugely so, mind you, but enough that I fired off an irritated tweet about the comment. Mr. Sales pointed out that it was not a comment made out of anger, but of a feeling that the individual's own investment in the Masterworks series had likely inspired the comment. I withdrew my retort, but it still bugged me.

I have been very frustrated about a number of related incidents in the last few weeks that highlight sexist undertones in the "mainstream" view of certain literatures. We have the dust-up over the Guardian SF poll (which inspired Ian's Mistressworks meme, and also resulted in Kari Sperring creating a version of it for fantasy). Then there was V. S. Naipaul and his sexist bullshit. We have a Wall Street Journal article on Young Adult literature that not only implies that much of it is decadent or "constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is," but makes heavily-demarcated suggestions for reading based on gender (with almost all of the suggestions' authors also segregated to match the reader's gender).

Finally, and this is what pushed me over the edge into anger, we have Esquire Magazine's "75 Books Every Man Should Read," a slideshow presentation of 75 titles that are "the greatest works of literature every published," only one of which is written by a woman (Flannery O'Connor). I found it after going to read Emma Bull's response to the YA article, but flipping through that gallery took me away from that debate and made me realize that all of these little moments of discursive idiocy added up to something, showed me parts of the puzzle that clicked together into an ugly puzzle. Patriarchy, gendered ideas of morality, cultural suppositions about art and authority, and echoes of hegemonic imaginative limits all collided.

Rather than pen some vast missive about it, however, I thought that responding in kind would be a better idea. To that end, I present a list of 75 books (in no particular order, except for the first one) that I think males should read, not to reinforce some prevailing gender notions or make them feel good about themselves and their taste in books, nor to reify certain ideas about what a canon should contain or who gets to be in it or what books are allegedly transcendent or special to men. If readers stick to "the classics" as prescribed in this manner they are cheating themselves out of what reading can show them.

I present this as a list of works that have the potential to shake a reader's thinking up and create more perceptive discussions about the issues that these incidents have brought to the fore (including the idea of what "books for men" should address). The title of my post is a play on the Esquire title, these are books that I would recommend to anyone. Due to time constraints I have not added links, but Google and book sites and library catalogs can be easily employed to find most of these. I have tried to keep comments to a minimum for the same reason. Find out more for yourselves.

1) How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ (Obvious? Yes. Dated? Read it and find out for yourself, for Athena's sake).

2) Our Guys, by Bernard Lefkowitz.

3) The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin

4) Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, edited by Miriam Schneer.

5) The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt.

6) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

7) Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, by Ralph Cintron.

8) Living My Life, by Emma Goldman.

9) Myths of Male Dominance, by Eleanor Burke Leacock.

10) A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen.

11) Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millett.

12) A Martian Muse, by Reginald Shepherd.

13) The Collected Poems, by Anna Akhmatova.

14) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, by Lila Abu-Lughod

15) The Stars Down to Heaven and Other Essays, by Theodore Adorno.

16) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, by Veena Das.

17) Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, by Henry David Thoreau

18) Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor.

19) Peace, by Gene Wolfe.

20) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Friere

21) Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou =: Struggle Without End, by Ranginui Walker.

22) Swagger and Remorse, by Richard Fox.

23) The Awakening, by Kate Chopin.

24) The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson.

25) Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong.

26) Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente.

27) The Interpretation of Cultures, by Clifford Geertz

28) The Sultana's Dream, by Rokheya Shekawat Hossein

29) Housekeeping, by Marilyn Robinson.

30) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgeois.

31) The Alteration, by Kingsley Amis.

32) Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes.

33) So Long Been Dreaming, ed. by Nalo Hopkinson.

34) Payback, by Margaret Atwood.

35) Wizard of the Crow, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

36) The Fact of A Doorframe, by Adrienne Rich.

37) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki.

38) Lettres d'un Voyageur, by Georges Sand.

39) Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany.

40) Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand.

41) Hunger, by Knut Hamsun.

42) The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde

43) Dragonflies: Fiction by Chinese Women in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Shu-Ning Sciban

44) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.

45) The Tale of Genji, by Lady Shikibu Murasaki

46) The Sambia: Ritual, Sexuality, and Change in Papua New Guinea, by Gilbert Herdt.

47) Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys.

48) Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. by Gerda Lerner.

49) On Wings of Song, by Thomas M. Disch

50) Fear: A Cultural History, by Joanna Bourke

51) Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf.

52) The House of Discarded Dreams, by Ekaterina Sedia. (Which I have written about at length on this blog)

53) The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold

54) Forms of Distance, by Bei Dao.

55) Bloodchild and Other Stories, by Octavia Butler.

56) Christopher and his Kind, by Christopher Isherwood.

57) Dust Tracks on the Road, by Zora Neale Hurston.

58) Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees.

59) Selected Poems, by W. H. Auden.

60) Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among Bugis in Indonesia, by Sharyn Graham Davies.

61) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, by Herbert Marcuse.

62) Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin.

63) The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver.

64) Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia,by Michael Löwy.

65) The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir

66) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon

67) Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, by David Gilmore.

68) Our Bodies, Ourselves, by The Boston Women's Health Collective

69) Sensation, by Nick Mamatas.

70) I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister & My Brother . . . , by Michel Foucault.

71) Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison.

72) Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith.

73) Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes.

74) A Space by the Side of the Road, by Kathleen Stewart.

75) The Female Man, by Joanna Russ.

Pachycephalic Kakorrhaphiophobia

I got some nice compliments on the FoG column today. I was a little worried that it would pass unnoticed, but several people, including James Enge, Paul Jessup, and Cat Valente responded in some fashion to it (For example, Cat boosted the signal after declaring her happiness at being on the list). I was pretty nervous about this column, and I am still not sure why. Maybe because I put a lot of work into it, or perhaps because I thought that it might not work. To date most of my columns have been extemporaneous; this one required a lot of planning and reading, more than I had thought it would require.

But I learned a lot from it. First of all, I am still as anxious as crap about a significant piece of writing until someone responds to it. I am usually not too concerned about my FoG columns because, honestly, I don't know if they are widely read. Comments are often sparse on the site anyway, but particularly for my columns which are far less pop-culture oriented than those of my compatriots. I am usually more nervous about the reception of my Apex blog posts, which are read more closely (as I found out in particular with the postmodernism column). This column, however, meant a lot to me in terms of the care put into it and, well, the love.

I love speculative fiction, fantastika, SF, fantasy, widdlezingsongwubble, whatever you want to call the array of fantastic literatures. I would be a very different, and I think much suckier, person without the influence of imaginative fiction on my life. While it has not saved me from myself (and really, there's nothing that can do that, except you yourself), it has been lens and comforter, puzzle and joy for over 3/4ths of my life. While I hope to write a lot more about it (and a lot more OF it!), this assignment required me to look hard at the literature I love and think about what makes it resonate for me, and how that might be a quality that others, who may not share that love, can appreciate. I find it to be both a daunting exercise and a sort of cultural duty to show people what fantastika has to offer, because I feel that it has done so much for me.

I'm quite happy that people liked the column, and that my thick-headed fear of failure was unwarranted.

The Stuff In My Head

It has been a weirdly exciting few days in my little writing world. Besides struggling with fear (apparently, of success for once rather than failure), I was all juiced up to write my new Forces of Geek column on literary steampunk vs. the DIY culture it has spawned, when Lev Grossman wrote a WSJ piece that tumbled into the SF playground like a Saturnian mind-grenade. A lot of pixels have been configured either taking Grossman to task or wondering what the heck his piece means. The best responses so far are Cheryl Morgan's and Catherynne M. Valente's. In writing something so broad that makes such a large point, Grossman has set himself up for a lot of critique and started a pretty fascinating conversation about what authors should write and what readers want to read.

It kind of feels like a set-up too. The article is a social act, a ritual performance of a sort that is often seen in SF, and also in the wider writing world. It not only sets out an argument about the nature and proper design of the novel, it sends the reader a message about the author. The author positions himself (in this case) not only as an authority, but as both guardian and trailblazer of Good Literature. The author aligns himself with whatever movement or variety of literature he is championing, even as he interprets the literary world for the reader.

I've been jotting down ideas all day for a new column that picks up some of these ideas and lays them out. I think there's a lot to talk about, both in literary terms and in terms of the social life of literature and how we participate in it when diatribes such as these surface. The column is gonna be long, but I won't be able to talk about everything that I want to address, so I will continue my musings here.