Literary Diversity

I have always been a voracious reader. However, I only recently realized I was not a very diverse reader.

Growing up, my mom was an avid reader. She would take my sister and me to the library almost as much as she went herself. We would go home with our canvas bags full of as many books as they would let us check out at one time (on all three of our accounts). It was a lot of books.

As we got older and graduated to chapter books, the sacks got slightly lighter.

My sister decided reading wasn’t really for her. She wouldn’t rediscover her passion for it until she was swept up in the Harry Potter series in high school.

I continued to read but found myself in kind of a literary gray area. The books for my age group were too easy. I have several librarian friends now, but as a kid, I was on my own to figure out what I like to read. I wasn’t very successful. Instead, when I wasn’t reading for school, I turned to the books my mom was reading.

She liked murder mysteries. Now, I am not hating on genre fiction. I enjoyed her books.  But the thing with genre fiction is it isn’t very diverse. Scan the shelves of any genre fiction section, and you will notice that most of the authors are pretty similar.

And what I was getting from school wasn’t much better. We read a lot of what would be considered classics, but even the contemporary stuff was pretty White European. Sure, senior year there was a splash of Russian and African literature, but for the most part, the books I read growing up were white, white, white.

I specifically remember disliking Crime and Punishment. Something about it was off. Also, I couldn’t pronounce all the names, and I got a lot of the characters confused. It would be several more years before I could really understand why, though.

College wasn’t much better. Despite being a lit major, assigned reading was still almost entirely written by white European authors. I did sign up for a Native American Lit class, but it was canceled before semester started and I ended up in Contemporary Irish Lit instead. I graduated with  B.A. in English and Creative Writing, but still no reading diversity.

In the end, it took moving half way across the world to open up my reading horizons. When I moved to Japan, one of the first things I did was start reading their literature. I read classics like The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book. I also fell in love with some of their contemporary writers. Kafka on the Shore has become one of my all-time favorite books, though I can’t say I love all of Murakami’s works. But it wasn’t just Japanese Literature. I would haunt the foreign language section of my local used book store grabbing any title that piqued my interest. I read a surprising amount of Spanish Literature while I was in Japan. Apparently, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is quite popular in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The more I read from other cultures, the more I realized how much our writing style and preference is based on culture. At first, the Spanish and Japanese books frustrated me. Their stories didn’t follow the rules I was used to – the rules I had been taught, the rules I tried to apply to my own writing. Their stories meandered, fell off, picked back up, and sometimes just ended. I still get angry when I think of the ending of Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart.

But over time, I came to appreciate the differences. I came to realize that, depending on the values and history of your culture, there can be many ways to tell the same story. The goal of every author is the same, but how they get there is shaped by the writing styles of their culture.

Sadly, now that I am back in the U.S. my reading diversity has shrunk slightly. My job writing English lessons online has cluttered my desk with more White European classics than I had on my bookshelf in Japan. However, I am still trying to make time to read things from other cultures. Crime and Punishment has moved from a dusty bookshelf to the bottom of my to read pile, just under my new translation of The Tale of Genji.

Reading is important, but diverse reading might be even more so. For me, foreign literature gave me a way to understand the nuances of a culture that wasn’t my own. It also caused me to examine what the stories I grew up reading said about the values of my White European culture. As a writer, it has opened my eyes to a whole new world of literary elements and styles. Stories don’t have to follow the rules I spent most of my life learning. Personally, I like it better if they do, but not every story has to be told the same way. A frightening and thrilling idea for any writer. Or reader.