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blogging, insanitybytes22, opinion, reading, tales, women authors
A couple of conversations about women writers have sparked my interest, first this silly notion that people must read in some kind of quota system to prove their non sexism. What rubbish is this? I should state outright that I am a reading snob, much like I am a coffee snob. I have no intention of wading through things that don’t interest me in the name of political correctness.
I do tend to read men more than I read women and that is not sexism but rather a fondness for substance, style, and tone. Women can be awesome, amazing writers, and if they have some wit and intelligence, I will fall in love with their books, too. I read a lot of stuff written prior to 1920.
I was curious about what lurks behind my aversion to modern authors, especially women, but there are many men I have also hurled at the wall. It has to do with superficiality, emotional dishonesty, narratives, preaching, and romance.
I love romance, I love interpersonal relationships, but they can become a bit like gratuitous sex and violence in a Hollywood movie. They replace the story, they become a substitute for actually building a tale. I call these things biological bliss hits. She kisses some guy, “he loves me, he loves me not,” and there is this angst…but nothing more, no story, no song being sung. It is a bit like placing a car crash in an action, adventure movie. It compels me to ask, “and?” But there is no “and.” Some movies are simply made with little story to them, they are all about the crashes and things being blown up. That might work in a movie, but it doesn’t work so well in a novel, at least not for me. I need some adventure, a treasure hunt, mystery, some dragon slaying, architecture that has crafted a tale.
It’s somewhat sad to me, what is popular today, what is marketable, is not necessarily a well crafted tale, a song being sung, but rather a volume filled with those biological bliss hits I spoke of. So, the Twilight series, 50 Shades of Gray, both women writers who achieved great success but left me despairing for all of womankind.
I’ve written about this before, about the way I loved the old Nancy Drews as a child, before they were edited, cleaned up, presenting a narrative, a bit of social engineering. It is truth that I miss, emotional honesty, stories that speak from the soul. The soul is not always a place of romance, conquest, winning, but also of grief, rejection, loss and suffering. Futility, frustration. Sometimes it is in those darker places that we discover the truth about ourselves, that we learn what we are made of.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
I read a lot of both women and men though much of what passes as “scholarship” (though some of us have mistaken it for a garbage shop) has stated that most of the women I have read were “forced” to write what they wrote by men…
St Hildegard of Bingen, St Teresa of Avila, St Catherine of Sienna, St Therese of Lisieux, St Angela of Foligno, and St Julian of Norwich is a must-read. I have Bl Mary of Agreda and Ven Anne Catherine Emmerich on my wish-list as well.
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LOL, forced to write what they wrote, huh? I think not. The only one I can think of that may have been forced is Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, because she had to keep the stories interesting so the king wouldn’t execute her before the story was finished. I’m pretty sure she herself was a work of fiction, however. 🙂
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The theory is that the all the women accused of heresies wrote with their own free mind because no one who submits their writings to the Church, God forbid a women! (as they apparently leave out Meister Eckhart), truly writes with a free mind.
Only men actually were capable of freely submitting themselves to the Church. The theory that the women did not write what they wrote and meant something else is very ridiculous.
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Ahh, I see. Well, I haven’t read them all but I do remember St Teresa of Avila had many men as mentors and spiritual advisors. It was actually some of the men of the church that stood up for her, that encouraged her, perhaps even kept her grounded.
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Same is true for St Angela and St Hildegard. And in turn, they have kept many men well-grounded as well 🙂
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Have you ever read and Linda Fairstein? She was a lawyer in charge of NYC’s rape unit for 25 years and then became a mystery writer – excellent books.Or Kathy Reichs -she was a forensic anthropologist in both North Carolina and Montreal Quebec (simultaneously) for many years and now writes mystery novels. Excellent realism.. Or Canadian Elizabeth Hay – I’d suggest reading her 5 novels in order. She starts out (really) driving her old beat up car to the Arctic where she gets hired as a radio DJ at a tiny local station (true) – and all the stories that come out of this (fiction based on personal experience) in the North. If you like detective stories there is a fictional doctor named Kay Scarpatta written by Patricia Cornwell who fights crime based in her doctorly business.This author tends to be dark but very real.And she has a very rich tech-goddess sister who flies helicopters and drives Lamborghinis and is dying.
That’s just a few of my favorite female authors. I find that I can only tolerate good female authors or male authors who write strong female characters.
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Ah yes, I have read some of them, Paul. You have good taste!
I too need strong female characters, or actually “real” female characters. They don’t have to be strong, but they do have to be real. It’s a bit funny, I was reading a story the other day and somehow managed to upset my husband. He asked how the book was and I said “the woman in this story is so boring, so superficial, I’ve been praying a tiger would come along and eat her.” He apparently does not believe we should be wishing harm on people, not even on our imaginary characters. It was amusing, his reaction surprised me. Alas, I cannot wish for tigers to eat people, or at least if I do, I’ll have to keep it to myself. 🙂
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Ha! Munch, Munch! Another one bites the dust.
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You always articulate well. I love reading your posts. Continue expressing the depth of who you are.
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Thank you for your kind words and for reading 🙂
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food for thought. I will not waste my time on bad writing…why should I. These are personal blogs and one can use them as diaries journals etc, but I don’t have to read dribble or the venting of ones sexual experiences blow by blow, literally. Now if they want and are capable of wrapping it up in a bow of gorgeous verse, well that’s different. 🙂
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Oh yes, wrap that stuff up in a gorgeous verse and you’ll have me! The venting of sexual experiences, yes that annoys me too, as does perpetual victimhood. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I just need something a bit more inspiring.
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exactly, its not wrong, its all in what you enjoy and there’s is the right to write and the right to move along! 🙂
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It’s interesting what makes people tick. So it’s equally interesting how different authors and different types of books appeal to different people. I’m a romantic. And I don’t mean in the sappy sense although that may sometimes be true. I mean I’m a romantic in the classic literature sense. I like what I read to take me out of my world. I like what I read to fascinate me or to free me from day to day concerns or to lift me up and make me happy. Strangely I also sometimes read non-fiction. Nevertheless, I really enjoy some of the better fantasy and science fiction. I do NOT like to read tragedies. I do not like most of the most popular stuff. There’s so much of it that seems to me like watching a soap opera except reading it from a written form. Reflections of day to day romances and breakups just bore me or depress me. I enjoy great children’s picture books. I love older children’s literature like The Secret Garden. And as in most areas of life I tend to march to the beat of my own drum. I feel free to not like anything I choose even if others think it fits perfectly with what I’m supposed to like or what I claim to generally like.
I did read the first Twilight book btw, because my youngest wanted to read it and I decided to preview it and consider her request. I ended up advising her against reading it back then at her young age. On the other hand, I didn’t think it was as devoid of writing talent as I often hear people claim. I haven’t read 50 shades because everything I ever hear about it leads me to be repulsed or irritated or a little bit horrified….including what I hear from fans. But my middle child wants to be an author and she has been shown snippets of it in online writing groups which she then shows to me. That book has the most serious issues of poor writing, poor syntax, poor grammar, and just flat out bizarre and incomprehensible mistakes I’ve ever seen published, which is generally why aspiring authors discuss it…it makes them crazy that it made money but is as bad as it is. I don’t like to go around thinking of people as stupid. But that book, once you set aside the horror of the immorality of it, could make you weep for the decaying intellect of our culture.
Of modern era books:
Favorite picture book: Where The Wild Things Are
Favorite author of picture books: Patricia Polacco
current Favorite overall author: Diana Wynne Jones
honorable mention: Robert Jordan; although I’ve never read his Conan series, and the one I tried under one of his other pen names was not fit for recommending to decent folk, his storytelling powers in The Eye Of The World Series are outstanding.
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Ha! I love it, a fellow soul. The Secret Garden is one of my all time favorites as is Where the Wild Things Are. I’ve also read many Conan books.
You are so right here, “Reflections of day to day romances and breakups just bore me or depress me.” Me too! I’m a romantic too, but there must be some swashbuckling adventure to it. It’s interesting you mentioned “depressing.” I actually get depressed reading some romance when it begins to have that soap opera flavor. I don’t like to eat soap when life has this whole banquet laid out for us.
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Consider this – Could it be that much of your preference for authors from the “past” is because the gate keepers in today’s Pub Bus are are so inbred that they pre-select material you would not like? I’ve been told my work isn’t “messaged enough.” Pick up a copy of “Bully Route Home” and see if its messaged enough. The fact is that in all modes of life we increasingly asked to view everything from narrow, singular viewpoint.
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That might very well be it, Sandy. I’ve noticed in reading some of the books out of the YA publishing world that the most successful ones for me are books that probably do have an intended “message” to them but almost by accident have a full enough content and world that not everyone reading will perceive the same message. Despite knowing I was supposed to, I didn’t really like The Giver. I hated Maximum Ride. I mean really. Could it have been any more of a propaganda piece? Plus I’d never read Patterson before that and had no idea his writing success had nothing to do with writing skill or level. At least he sure knows how to make money catering to the lowest common denominator of poor attention spans and sheople reading style. Actually I’m kind of wondering if his books are written by committee and his publisher maybe just uses his name.
But then I really appreciated several things about both The Pain Wars and The Hunger Games when my kids begged me to read them, despite both being too dark to fit at all with my personal preferences. (My kids have very little sympathy with my need to be lifted up by books. Come on; aren’t there any books they could love that have great comedic relief?)
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That’s a really good point, Sandy. “Messaged,” I wonder if that’s like politically correct, preachy, kind of like the approved brand? There can be a real cookie cutter, mass produced feel to many modern books, which would make sense if only a few people were selecting them. Thank goodness for some self publishing and independents out there.
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Messaged is inclusive of those items mentioned. Name recognition not talent is Numero Uno today – Many major authors are quasi editors and coauthor tons of book in their name.
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I think “biological bliss hits” (great line! :D) are just fine. They DO speak from the soul –who said the soul is separate from the biological body?! What, are men so high and holy because they are severed from their own biological bodies, which they in but deny? We women want to have fun. Getting our biology tickled, that’s deep enough in itself. We have nothing to be ashamed of. I, too, “have no intention of wading through things that don’t interest me in the name of political correctness.”
I like “gratuitous” sex and violence in a good story. It’s real. It is not inherently without meaning. That’s plenty of emotional honesty, plenty enough of a song to be sung.
You have this paragraph here: “I do tend to read men more than I read women and that is not sexism but rather a fondness for substance, style, and tone. Women can be awesome, amazing writers, and if they have some wit and intelligence, I will fall in love with their books, too.”
Now let’s flip that around.
“I do tend to read women more than I read men and that is not sexism but rather a fondness for substance, style, and tone. Men can be awesome, amazing writers, and if they have some wit and intelligence, I will fall in love with their books, too.” You know, if men only had some wit and intelligence.
Mmm hmm.
So, you are right after all: “Sometimes it is in those darker places that we discover the truth about ourselves, that we learn what we are made of.”
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