There is a very good chance that if you’re reading this right now, it’s because you followed a link from my Goodreads profile. That’s not a bad thing – I put the link there for a reason, and I also regularly post reviews to Goodreads for a reason. Which makes the rest of what I’m about to say sound a bit contradictory.
So to get it out of the way, I do like the fact that there is a space where I can write up my dorky little blurbs about books I’ve recently read, and compare them to what others write about them if so inclined. I’m not an active user, per se. I don’t ever check my feed or seek out connections. Mostly, I just twitch in place like a whirligig.
Maybe that’s loyalty – after all, I joined very early on, one of the only circumstances where I’ve ever been an “early adopter” of anything, and that was thanks to an invite from my then-roommate’s then-girlfriend. Nearly 20 years ago, Jesus. But thanks for that push all the same, Amelia. I have diligently read and responded since, more for my own purposes than any sense of community. That being said, if someone reaches out to me, I try to respond, because if someone is paying me the courtesy of interacting with my thoughts on things, I owe them the courtesy of, at the very least, a thank you.
It was thus that I, against my own intentions, became a person who projects influence (not gonna use that word…). At present, I am the most followed user in the Kingdom of Thailand. For what it’s fucking worth.
Of course, this has led to strange interactions, both good and bad. I have gotten weird DMs from clearly autistic people who melt down when I fail to engage with their special interest in the same way they have (RIP DMs). I have gotten some horny responses to my 29 year old twinkself in my profile pic from men, women, and everything in between. And this is to say nothing of the trolls, whom I collect and delight in. According to the commentariat of Goodreads, I am a crypto-fascist right-wing troll myself, I am a godless communist hellbent and dismantling these blessed United States, I am a Trotskyist LARPer who fails to properly appreciate the Actually Existing Socialism of the USSR and PRC, I am shedding white tears, I am a typical performative reader performative male lit-bro, I have polluted my mind with postmodern neo-Marxism, I’m doing a problematic ableism, I have strayed from the One True Church of Rome (OK, that one’s pretty much true).
But as I said, I didn’t engage in the community, and so I don’t know if it was always shit, or whether it’s become shit, but I know that, at least for the past several years, Goodreads writ large has absolutely been shit.
That being said, I do like my own self-selecting land of the Sebald- and Duras- and Deleuze-reading lotus eaters. As with any large platform, Goodreads is divided into regions, and there’s no reason why I would wander over into the section of spicy romance readers, or vice versa. Yet it’s the spicy romance readers that set the tone, by and large, and on the rare occasion that I read a fairly well-known piece of contemporary fiction, I’m forced to see what the broader community has to say.
Thus it was after finishing Mariel Franklin’s Bonding, hardly the best novel, but also hardly the worst, but a book which I rather admired for its desire to capture the present moment (something so few literary novels seem willing to do in any serious sense), even as I regretted how poorly it would age. But let’s look at the literal top review on Goodreads…
“If coming across Zionist propaganda 15% in wasn't enough for me to dnf…”
It almost goes without saying that this person clearly has no idea what Zionist propaganda is, because I combed over the first few chapters to find anything remotely Zionist, and it also almost goes without saying that this person’s favorite books are all young adult, and that they’re currently reading is all queer romantasy. They’re still in their early 20s, so I’ll grant them some grace, but I get the feeling that she picked up Bonding noting its themes of queer romance and late capitalism, and reacted in much the same way a child fed on Count Chocula might respond to actual adult food.
I was going to give you a few examples of other top reviews that strike me as profoundly foolish, but I’ll pick out one representative example in particular. Again, let me emphasize that this is from the top fucking review of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a powerful roman-a-clef about the legendary slave rebellion:
“Does this really seem like the way a psychopathic uneducated slave would talk? Not to me it doesn't. What it sounds like is an overeducated middle-class 20th-century writer.”
Because maybe, just maybe, Styron was trying to convey the historical Nat Turner’s ferocious intelligence and clandestine education, and introducing a magical realist device to help us understand his common humanity with the presumedly educated readership, especially when counterpointed with the slave owners who have the same highfalutin rhetoric while committing barbarous crimes against their fellow man.
But if that’s what they fail to understand, what do they like?
Well, for the spooky
season, they’ve got a massive (102 book long!) recommend list of witchy reads,
including both fiction or nonfiction. So before looking, I thought of witchy
reads from my perspective… but surprise, surprise, no The Witches of Eastwick,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Famished
Road, or The
Master and Margarita. Hell, even the quality children’s fiction of Lloyd Alexander,
Ray Bradbury, or Philip Pullman has no place here, my god, even the delightful Kiki’s
Delivery Service (a rare example of a manga I genuinely adore) is deemed
unworthy. The only book that I thought of that actually made it in was Anne
Rice’s The Witching Hour, which would be hard to leave out, given Anne Rice’s
prominent position in the Goth-girl canon, and that is an awful lot of their
userbase (more on that later).
Really, very few of the books they mention have even crossed my radar. Of the few that does, one of the most prominent is Madeline Miller’s Circe, a book I have no desire to read because… I mean, that’s fanfic, really. Mostly, I get splashy covers, retellings of historical characters, starry-eyed YA, yass-queen witches who totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, nonfiction about how historical witches all were total yass queens who would totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, and frequent, frequent promises of prose you can rub your snatch to. I know – what the fuck do I expect from a list having to do with witches? – but I don’t think it’s unreasonable, in those 102 books, to expect some crossover with the serious literary canon. I was pretty surprised that Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead didn’t make the list, even though it would seem a natural fit.
But that’s the thing – there are plenty of analogous things that I would be fine with. There’s great historical fiction, there’s great YA fiction, there’s great feminist prose, both fiction and nonfiction, hell there’s even great erotica. But what makes them great is that they engage the reader rather than feeding them a pre-packaged message. Shirley Jackson is far too actually spooky and actually weird for this list.
And given how much effort is put into diversity in these sectors, this list seems remarkably un-diverse to me. Most writers about witches are women, as I would expect, and many seem to be in some way LGBTQ or women of color, but they are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly from the English-speaking world. I haven’t combed through, but I don’t think there’s a single translation in here, actually. And to be quite frank, the experience of an upper middle-class daughter of a diaspora at a private school in California, for example, has far more in common with that of a white girl at the same private school than it does with that of a girl her own age in the land of her ancestors. Which is a shame, because there are so many witchy tales from Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Africa that are worth telling, and I’m sure are being told, and in fact I know are being told. Let’s expand a little bit beyond the witch category. These readers claim to want writers of color, but how many of them could stomach Eldridge Cleaver, Tayeb Salih, Sayaka Murata, or Young-Ha Kim? Queer writers please, but it’s not like they’re asking for Jean Genet, Gary Indiana, Kate Bornstein, or Camille Paglia.
But that’s not comfy content, now is it?
And in this way, most of Goodreads seems to want one thing, above all else: to escape into another world in which all of their assumptions and the totality of their worldview assuaged, and as long as a book does so with enough aplomb, it is a Good Read. While most of these readers would recoil at being cast as conservative in any way, shape, or form, they are remarkably Victorian in their worldview. Good art reflects good morals, and vice versa. Aesthetic expression ought reflect virtue.
I had some trouble finding recent, concrete data about the userbase of Goodreads, but from what I can surmise, it’s about what I would expect – overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly found in the Anglosphere, mostly in the 25-40 age bracket, and despite my demographic commonality with most of those characteristics, it’s so, so, so not for me.
It’s not that it’s actively hostile at all, most of the women in kooky statement eyeglasses on there are actually pretty friendly. But the rose gold and corporate-Memphis illustrations quietly tell me that this isn’t exactly a space designed for me (is this what it’s like to look at Barstool if you’re a woman?). Even the explicitly conservative sections mostly seem to consist of tradwives with Regency illustrations as their avis, highlighting their favorite devotionals and bemoaning novels that don’t retread Jane Austen.
But even those are the exception as far as men go – let me temper any claims of misogyny with some very active misandry. Since the birth of the Western tradition of the novel as such in the 18th Century, fiction has been misogynistically denigrated as the realm of female fantasy. Real men read classical epic poetry and serious theology don’t you see, leaving the imagination to the weak feminine mind. And we’ve returned to that point, just in inverse. I’m amazed by the number of men who tell me, with a straight face, “I don’t read books.” They engage in fiction, but the fiction they engage in is anime, superhero movies, video games, and porn. And while there’s nothing 100 percent wrong with any of those three things, there’s also nothing 100 percent wrong with Butterfinger bars. When you have a pile of them for dinner, we have a problem.
So why do I care? No one’s making me read their bullshit, right?
First, because I am a reader, and it makes me terribly sad that this is what the supposed vanguard of readership is, and it explains why I so rarely read contemporary fiction. Because I can’t stomach this shit. And secondly, because I am a writer, and it reminds me how few people will give a fuck about the sort of things I write.
I’m already hearing another objection… “well, it’s always been that way.” And to a certain degree, the strawman I’ve erected has a point. Go look at any list of Pulitzer winners over the decades, or New York Times bestseller lists from any decade, and you’ll see an absolute ocean of mediocrities, long since lost to history. These were the people Dwight MacDonald mocked in Masscult and Midcult 70 years ago, and his satire fails to land now because no one remembers who the fuck James Gould Cozzens is. But even if the majority of writing has always been dreck, there was always at least space for more sophisticated work. Go watch old Dick Cavett interviews – he was on the air for ages, and he actually brought on serious, literary writers. There was big-name prose in Playboy. John Barth’s fucked up, experimental, violent, satirical, freewheelingly postmodernist Giles Goat-Boy made the NYT bestseller list for 12 straight weeks in 1966 – unthinkable now.
So then on to the final objection: then why stick around? Firstly, it’s been a great place for me to track my own reading for my own sake, and second, I have gotten some real insight from my tiny niche community – once again, I see you guys, what up! And third, it’s to bear witness. I think it’s telling that my most liked review is of Mishima’s Sun and Steel (speaking of queer writers of color who are unlikely to be featured…), and that says to me that there are people on Goodreads who care about something more. And a lot of them have reached out to me. They are, like the average Goodreads user, mostly women, mostly about my age or a bit younger (from what I can tell), but there the paths begin to diverge. They’re definitely not overwhelmingly white or from the Anglosphere. And beyond the demographics, they are people who have drank from the same wells, and who have experienced the same frustrations. And for that I love them with all brotherly affection I can muster.
And so I’ll close with the same mantra I always say to those around me in dire times, with dire circumstances all around, and I’m saying it to myself just as much as to you, the reader…
You are not crazy. You are not alone.
