Well done, Mr. Potter: Uncollected Thoughts on The Boy Who Lived

Though the final book came out more than four years ago, the capstone (for now at least) on Harry Potter couldn't be placed until the final movie premiered. And here we are. Harry Potter is such a phenomenon that it's difficult to get any kind of perspective on it. From a publishing perspective, it was a once in a generation event, perhaps even a singular one. From a cultural standpoint, it cut across all traditional demographic lines. From a commercial angle, it is probably the most profitable artistic work in human history not named Star Wars. So to try to reduce The Boy Who Lived into a single essay or editorial seems foolhardy. Instead, here are some uncollected thoughts:

1. This will probably be the last book/series of books that are so conspicous out in public. Not only were the volumes themselves big and recognizable, but they were printed. Future mega-sellers will be consumed in large part on e-reading devices. I've often wondered if the public consumption of the Harry Potter books contributed their wild success, publicizing and legitmizing children's books for adult consumption. 

2. In many ways, Harry Potter represents the final integration of geek culture into mainstream culture, perhaps even becoming mainstream culture itself. Importantly, the first Harry Potter movie came out in 1999, 28 years after Star Wars premiered. I think the first generation of cultural geeks that Star Wars produced had a major influence on the fate of the Harry Potter franchise; not only were the children of Star Wars ready to consume fantasy themselves, but they could sanction their children to do the same. The generational pressure against genre that often exists was considerably lessened by the flowering of nerdom that had reached maturity by the late 90s. 

VIDA and Amazon: Charting Gender Bias in Reading and Reviewing

VIDA's study of gender bias in major review publications has put in numbers to what many of us have long felt: women writers do not get a proportional amount of attention from the mainstream press.

The study is well worth a look for all interested in contemporary literary culture, and I would also recommend reading Bookslut's on-going follow-up discussion about the matter. Frankly, I'm not surprised at VIDA's findings, but I am indeed surprised that anyone would be surprised about the findings. There's quite a bit more to be said about these matters, and I'm still mulling it over myself.

I will say, though, that VIDA's lede caught my attention: "Numbers don't lie. What counts is the bottom line." First, numbers may not "lie," but that's not the same thing as telling the truth. There are a host of reasons that these numbers might be misleading (though I don't think they are).

Second, and more interesting to me, is the idea of a literary "bottom line." VIDA suggests that review ratio is the ultimate measure of cultural attention, but is that the most telling barometer? I'm not sure that it is. Measuring the activity of the gatekeepers is interesting, but isn't what people are reading just as important, if not more so?

One could measure this in several ways (library lending, NY Times Bestseller Lists, Indie Bound Lists), but since Amazon will eventually do most of the bookselling in this country, I thought it would be a good place to start. So I looked at the 100 Bestselling Books, both overall and for Literature and Fiction, and here's what I found.

Of the Top 100 selling books, 47 were written by men, 39 by women (14 multiple-author books had an author of each gender or an institutional author).  

Of the Top 100 selling literature and fiction books, 54 were written by women and 46 by men. 

This suggests to me that what we see in the VIDA statistics is not overt gender bias on the part of readers and publishers, but by the literary-critical establishment, of which The New York Times, The Atlantic, et al are the most visible members. I don't have a totalizing explanation for why this might be, but I do have an idea for some part of it: the way we think about literature and literary history.

Literary criticism tends to be interested in influence and connection: we measure the greatness of today's work through what past great works it seems to be descended from. And the riverheads of literary history are overwhelmingly male. (Just as one example, The Modern Library's list of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century includes only six works by women. Time's list has 16. If we were to form lists for earlier centuries, this number would certainly decline). It stands to reason, then, that male writers are more likely to seem descended from the great (male) writers of the past.

What I am suggesting is that there is a bifurcation in literary "attention" between the male-centric world of capital-l Literature, and the habits and tastes of today's readers when it comes to gender (and probably a litany of other things). Which of these "bottom-lines" is more indicative and of what? I don't have an answer, but I suspect each individual's answer to that question say something about their position in the reading world.

May 9: Book Blog Jog

Thanks for stopping by The Reading Ape. Take a minute to poke around (you might sample the Featured Posts listed on the right), leave us a comment, then jog on over to http://lillieammann.com/blog/. If you would like to visit a different blog in the jog, go to http://blogjogday.blogspot.com.

Cheers, 

the Ape