Bittercon: No Childhood Left Behind

[attackfish]

As YA publishing expands and the internet connects readers from tremendously different backgrounds, it's no longer possible to talk about a "classic" set of formative first reading. How does our collaborative discourse on texts change when we have little in common among our formative reading experiences? And how do we engage with the often problematic heritage of our childhood favorites when no one we want to discuss them with has read them?

The above is the blurb for this panel at the 2011 Readercon, and after I read it, I was mystified. Harry Potter is the Beatles of my generation. When I was in middle school, you weren't anybody if you hadn't read The Golden Compass. Both school districts I went to middle school in assigned Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. Everybody I knew read To Kill a Mockingbird and Lovely Bones. My best friend and I bonded over having both read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books. I only stopped being in the target audience for YA books four years ago, and even in the information age, that isn't that long ago.

More and more, YA books are becoming best sellers.  Twilight and The Hunger Games have readers in the millions. Talking about the fracturing of reader interest seems a little counter to the evidence.

At the same time that YA and MG publishing is growing, the internet is expanding exponentially.
The world wide web is vast enough that no matter what almost unknown book you fell in love with as a child, there is always someone online who fell in love with it too and would just love to discuss it with you. The blurb touches on this but only in the sense that it brings in new perspectives, people who might have read an entirely different set of books. To me, it was the place where I finally found people who shared my favorite book series (which just won the 2011 Mythopoeic Award for Children's Literature, go Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief!).

What boggles my mind most about the above blurb is the blithe assumption that there ever has been a classic set of books that all children, or at least all bookish children read. We have always been divided by race, nationality, language, region, gender, genre, and taste. My avid readers of a mother and grandmother never read any of the books from their era that I consider classics (Except To Kill a Mockingbird), because they're just not into fantasy, and my grandmother was so turned off by the only Enid Blyton book she picked up that she decided that all children's books were worthless and I'm still convincing her otherwise.

I think the invocation of the internet as part of this new dilemma is telling. Suddenly voices that never had been heard, with their alternate childhood canons are being heard. They've always been there, it's just the people who did the public talking usually came from the same kind of background and were therefore exposed to the same books until now.

People who read the same books will always find each other, and we have always had to deal with people who have different canons of past reading. The community of readers will survive.

What are your experiences with the internet, individual canons, and the fracturing of reader interest? Fandom certainly complicates the matter at least for me, and a lot of you, but not all of you, dear readers are fannish. Is there a set of children's and teen books you would consider to be essential, and why?

Written for bittercon  the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Readercon.

Comments

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the topic is slightly more relevant in the context of something like Readercon, where you're looking at a pool of a couple hundred people to pull your overlapping tastes from. Everyone there will likely have heard of Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, but finding people who've read your favorite lesser-known works may be getting harder in a realspace based on people who read, rather than in an internet space where your search criteria can include the book you want to discuss. Hence the bit about no one we want to discuss them with, I'm guessing.

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

Reading that blurb, I hear the echo of arguments like "Why aren't young people versed in the Western canon anymore?" and "What is the hell is the Western canon?" and "Damn it, why aren't my undergraduates chuckling at my witty Antigone reference? That one killed at the department meeting!" It's as you allude to, attackfish, that there's an assumption that there's *one* canon that *everybody* knows and partakes of.

Which I'd say is loosely true in a very, very broad sense, but nowhere near to what that blurb supposes. A century ago people dropped Biblical references and allusions in plays and political speeches because you could expect you audience to have a grounding in Bible stories. Nowadays we make off-hand references to Star Wars and Harry Potter because everyone's familiar with that instead. In fifty years, who knows what it'll be? But I'd call that more "common (pop) cultural currency" than "canon". The former is transient, the latter would be set in stone. What that blurb is supposing doesn't actually exist.


What are your experiences with the internet, individual canons, and the fracturing of reader interest?

Honestly, I've always found people who insist that I *must* read/see/play something to be incredibly annoying. If I can't be a Sci-Fi fan without first watching Firefly and then lighting a candle to Joss Whedon's genius, then I'm happy not to be a fan if it means I don't need to experience their canon.

On the flip side, I don't like to mock people because the stuff they're involved with doesn't interest me and I'm (willingly) unfamiliar with it. I frequent the SpaceBattles forum, and whenever anyone writes a story there, crossover or not, with My Little Pony: Friend Is Magic there is, without fail, some poster who has to come into the thread and give everyone grief: "What the hell is wrong with you? Don't ruin B5/WH40K/Doctor Who/Whatever by bringing ponies into it. Etc..."

Which is hardly fair. I may not like Firefly, that hallmark of current SciFi fandom canon, but I'll admit that there are probably good fics and fanart for it. I love Batman, but if someone crosses it over with Firefly I'm not going to complain. Such a crossover might even be really good -- heck, by far the best fic I've read in 2011 has been fusion between My Little Pony and effing Fallout (<http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/04/story-fallout-equestria.html"), so crack-ish ideas can work when played straight -- but I just won't read it because it's not my thing/canon.

So to summarize, I occasionally find online fandom's popular canon annoying, mostly due to the proselytizing angle (http://www.amazon.com/Joss-Whedon-my-Master-Now/dp/B000B67Q6E) than anything else, but I wouldn't be a dick to groups who like something I don't.

Is there a set of children's and teen books you would consider to be essential, and why?

Peter Pan has stood the test of time, pop culturally, although that's more from its various adaptations than the original book. Harry Potter probably will endure better as a book series. Other than that, I couldn't pick anything 'essential'. Every generation has the books that are important to it. Who knows if stuff like the Golden Compass will still be widely read in thirty years?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I will be forever grateful to the internet for giving me other people who read my books. Before then I'd never had people for all of them - the boys who shared Danny Dunn with me in third grade weren't reading Little Women or the All-of-a-Kind family; Mom read Zenna Henderson and Anne McCaffrey but not Asimov or Heinlein; the SF readers I met in high school weren't also reading Agatha Christie or L.M. Montgomery and on the flip side I've never read SF-must-reads like, oh, Robert Jordan or Kim Stanley Robinson.

Online I can find *someone* who loves any one of the kinds of books I love, and a surprising number of people who love a lot of them. And in turn that leads me to more of the books I love that I haven't yet encountered (I have been online since about 1986; the number of books I've read and loved purely because of online recs is hard to number by this point.)