Farewell to Farewell to Manzanar

I noticed recently that students are checking out Farewell to Manzanar for school reading. That's too bad. I have long believed that Farewell to Manzanar is a stubbornly mediocre book that deserved to go out of print. It had gone out of print for years, but in 2001, when the ReadMOre committee plucked it out of its deserved obscurity to make it the inaugural selection for the 'statewide' reading program, it had a new print run. Now local libraries are flooded with copies and local schools are assigning it.

Not that I don't think it deals with an important issue -- the forced encampment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II -- I just don't think it presents a very thorough or well-written version of the incident. Not only that, but the characters leave the camps pretty early in the book and a significant portion of the story deals with the narrator's struggle to become a cheerleader in her high school after the war. Gripping stuff.

Much better books to read on this subject would be Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida or Fighting for Honor: Japanese Americans and World War II by Michael L. Cooper. Even David Guterson's moving 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, though a work of fiction, presents a better look at the time. And after all, didn't most of us learn about the Great Depression reading Grapes of Wrath? Or about the meat-packing industry reading The Jungle? Great literature teaches, and though there is always the question of veracity in a work of fiction, I don't think we should be telling students to read an otherwise mediocre book just because it deals with important events. As E. B. White once said, 'There are no boring subjects, only boring writers.'

But this, in a nutshell, is the problem I've had with getting behind the whole ReadMOre project all along. In the first place, I think we have enough people all reading the same book without encouraging it. How many people have read The Da Vinci Code? The Firm? The Harry Potter books? Do we really need a dedicated yearly project to encourage people to read the same book?

And if so, does it have to be a book nobody would ever want to read except that the committee recommended it? I have read some of the selections, by no means all of them, and I have found the exercise scarcely worth my time. Sure, Calvin Trillin's Messages from My Father was a nice little book, but it pretty much ended there -- a nice little book. Mississippi Solo, Enemy Women, Betsey Brown -- I understand that these books were picked for their local or regional connections. But is this really what we want to encourage everyone to read? Does it undermine the effort to get people to read great literature when we push forward such mediocrities as if this is important stuff?

What do you think?

Boy Books and Girl Books

I just finished reading E. L. Doctorow's The March, which is the first book slated to be discussed by Webster Groves Public Library's new book discussion group. I liked it very much. I also recently spoke with a woman who told me she 'tried to read it.' It was a war novel, it was for men, she lost interest. I think that's too bad. It is a novel set during a war, during an important period of that war; but it is also a novel about many people in varying relationships and how those relationships are affected by the war. Even though there are pretty lengthy descriptions of battle sequences (which I quite enjoyed), the battles are not the meat of the book.

In libraries, we know that men and women read different things. Women like Nora Roberts and Mary Higgins Clark. Men like Tom Clancy. Authors who attract equal numbers of men and women -- John Grisham springs to mind -- are few and far between.

But should this prejudice extend to award-winning books of true literary merit? War and Peace is a war novel, but nobody can claim to be well read who hasn't read it. The novels of Jane Austen are, at a certain level, romance novels, but they are so well written that again, one has to have read them to be versed in English literature.

Having said that, I realize that for all my reading, I gravitate to male authors more than women authors. I will read Philip Roth before Joyce Carol Oates, T. C. Boyle before Margaret Atwood, even though I realize all of them hold arguably equal literary value.

Do you have a preference (or prejudice) in your own choice of books to read? Do you think it shouldn't be so, or do you just not let it bother you?