What Our Youthful Book Typologies Say About Us

Thanks to Ian Bremmer and the Ezra Klein Show for the inspiration for this one.

At the end of every episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, host Klein asks the guest or guests to name “three books you recommend to the audience.”

I like this. As a professional book recommender, why wouldn’t I? Chefs taste the food at other restaurants, and professional book recommenders should be curious about the books other people recommend. Sometimes when I’ve had enough of a particular conversation I’ll fast forward to the end just to catch that part.

It’s interesting and encouraging how often guests whose job it is to helps us wade through the thicket of international relations, or document the distortion of our tax policy to benefit the already wealthy, or explain the twisted right wing psychosis they pass off as a coherent philosophy name at least one book of fiction as part of their trio.

It’s not that I think fiction is some kind of de facto medicine for the soul, or that reading fiction makes you a better person, but the books people choose do give some insight into the kinds of people they are.

Lee Drutman, a political scientist who studies gerrymandering, recently included William Gaddis’s The Recognitions in his trio, describing it as “a book about forgery and authenticity and originality,” and it made me want to go back and re-listen to an episode I’d only been half paying attention to.

(Aside: Speaking of which, maybe I should do a William Gaddis book club where we read The Recognitions and then JR, a novel about a grade schooler who figures out capitalism and amasses a mass fortune of valuable crap ( via junk bonds, cheap stocks, tax loopholes) by mastering the language of bullshit and doing deals on the payphone in the hallway of his school. The protagonist, JR Vansant is a kind of walking meme of capitalism, capable of deploying the magic words that give him access to money. The novel was published in 1975 as a satire and now has largely come true.)

Anyway, I was particularly intrigued by one of the responses of recent guest Ian Bremmer, an expert in foreign policy who spent 90 minutes describing in gory and depressing detail what is apparent to even grade schoolers, the Trump Administration is a colossal shit show.

Then we got to the books, and Bremmer says:

Well, first, I’ve got to start with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because when I was in high school and college, there were basically three kinds of kids: There were the J.R.R. Tolkien kids that were way too dorky. Then there were the Ayn Rand kids, who you don’t trust to run anything. And then there were the Douglas Adams kids, and those were kind people. They were curious, they were interested, and that was a universe that really appealed to me.

I laughed because, well…this seemed pretty true, true to my experience at least, and also because as someone who has re-read the five books in the original “trilogy” (Douglas Adams readers will get this reference) multiple times, and even wrote some stories in high school trying to ape Adams’ strange humorous mix of the manic and dry, I felt a bit flattered by the taxonomy.

I could not get into Tolkien or really any fantasy that involved orcs and swords and stuff. I was cool with magic and evil (see The Dark is Rising) but epic battles bored me. I didn’t meet any Randoids nor read any Ayn Rand until college, and thankfully I’d both developed a sufficient conscience and care towards my fellow human and taste in literature to be utterly immune to her charms by that time.

Klein followed up: “I love this typology. There’s no book I’ve reread more than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Apparently this is a thing. Who else is a member of the club?

Bremmer is right about my age (56) while Klein is a generation younger (early 40s), so I was a bit surprised to hear this. The college students of Ezra Klein’s generation I was teaching in the early 2000’s were almost universally besotted with Harry Potter, and the distinctions one would make were not between readers of Rand, Adams and Tolkien, but which Hogwarts house you’d belong to.

(Another Aside: One of my all-time favorite moments in class was talking about this stuff with students, and one young woman who was not a particularly active participant, getting exasperated about the Harry Potter house identifiers, and interrupting the discussion by saying: “Everyone wants to believe they’re Gryffindors, but they’re just not!” )

I’m clearly a Ravenclaw, FYI.

It’s possible, given Klein’s age, that he discovered Hitchhiker’s just when he could’ve instead turned to Harry Potter, in which case his fandom makes total sense. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a perfectly appropriate book for a young teen, but it also has a world weary spirit that feels very adult. If you’re a semi-precocious young person, appreciating Adams makes you feel kind of cool even though you know you’re not cool…cool. I mean, for one you’re spending too much time reading books to be genuinely cool. You’re likely also setting your VCR to tape Monty Python episodes off of PBS. Maybe in Klein’s era he had Python on DVD, that lucky dog. I would like to get on the Ezra Klein show sometime and subtly throw in references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to see if he could resist responding in kind.

(It’s only a flesh wound, Ezra.)

It can be a bit of an unfair game to assign too much to these book fandom typologies, but there’s no doubt we are shaped by our formative texts when we’re young. Not indelibly or permanently shaped by any means. There are many a young Randoids who have a later softening towards humanity.

Others grow up to be Clarence Thomas.

Not every reader seems to take away the same lessons from the text of their fandoms either. Huge swaths of the authoritarian tech right, including Peter Thiel, claim Tolkien as one of their own. Rather than seeing a story of collective sacrifice across difference and culture to defeat an existential threat, Thiel sees a story of great heroes altering the fate of the world, presumably casting himself in one of those heroic roles. I bet he thinks he could handle the power of the ring without being corrupted.

Palantir, the corporate arm of our expanding fascist surveillance state, is named after a reference to the “palintiri” prophecy stones from the LOTR series, and the company reportedly has conference rooms using other Tolkien references.

Meanwhile, they’re building the Eye of Sauron.

Uh-oh!

Finding connection to these texts as a young person often serves as a kind of validation, a sense that because of this thing that we get and love, we are special or marked in a particular way. Serial education entrepreneur Sal Khan has often spoken of how science fiction like Asimov’s Foundation or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game have provided inspiration for his views.

He is particularly enamored with the bespoke AI tutors of Ender’s Game which provide characters an always available, dynamic presence stoking and validating the child’s curiosity. (Khan thought ChatGPT made such a future possible, but has since retreated from this claim.) In Ender’s Game these children are being trained to repel the existential threat of an invading species, to save the world.

To achieve this goal, the children are essentially manipulated into unknowingly committing specicide of an entire alien race while sacrificing millions of human soldiers. What are we to take from this young (and ongoing) fandom?

Khan also invoked a literal tech dystopia, Huxley’s Brave New World, in his book about a future AI revolution, Brave New Words.

An Unserious Book

Is Sal Khan just bad at reading? Maybe, but I think he sees different things than I do in the way technology is deployed in these books seeing learning as primarily the realm of autodidacts who know how to take advantage of resources and opportunities, to become a consequential person like Ender Wiggin, the young genius hero of Ender’s Game, rather than something done in community with others.

Of course this fandom signaling does not end in childhood. When I was in graduate school it became something of a thing to get hip to Denis Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son. It’s a great book, and the fandom was genuinely rooted in the effect the text has on the reader, but over time it has also become a signal among creative writing types that, you know, if you like this book you really get it.

Someone could probably scrape the thousands of books I’ve recommended at my Chicago Tribune column and here and feed them into Claude and get it to spit out a profile of me, the recommender.

This AI profile may even be “accurate” in many ways. LLMs are fundamentally about unravelling and reassembling patterns, and I’m certain there are patterns in my recommendations that reveal some parts of my self.

But here we bump up against the inevitable limits of these tools which have no capacity for experiences. Klein is not just a fan of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He says, “there’s no book I’ve reread more.” He has spent many hours in communion with that book.

Why? What is happening when we do this, when we decide to re-immerse ourselves in these stories again and again? What is behind these book-related typologies?

I’m not sure I fully know.

There must be other typologies beyond the Hitchhiker/LOTR/Rand categories Ian Bremmer posits. What can you think of?

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Sonya Walger’s new novel, Wifehouse, which comes just a year after her previous novel, Lion. Both are fantastic. I recommend them.

At Inside Higher Ed I shared how and why I managed to (mostly) quit the learning management system toward the end of my teaching career.

Rebecca Makkai has an interesting, insider reflection of how book prizes work. It’s actually pretty much how I thought book prizes work, but I guess that means I’m more of an insider than I thought I was.

Another long, interesting piece from Jeffrey Lawrence using Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books as a vehicle to consider the differences between “close reading” and “immersive reading.”

From the deep Biblioracle Recommends archives, a post from 2021 when most of you weren’t here about who wins literary prizes.

Who Wins Literary Prizes?

Via my friends McSweeney's and by the always funny Carlos Greaves, “The New Odyssey Movie Is Not Historically Accurate; Matt Damon Isn’t the Least Bit Greek.”

Recommendations

1. Discontent by Beatriz Serrano
2. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Trip by Amie Barrodale
4. The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Andrea C. - Boston, MA

For Andrea, my instincts tell me to go with a book that’s unsettling in interesting ways, Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee.

1. Lost Lambs by Madline Cash
2. The Ten Year Affair by Erin Sommers
3. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst
4. Go Gentle by Maria Semple
5. On the Calculation of Volume (I through III) by Solvej Balle

Mary G. - Los Angeles, CA

From a few years back a book that seems to frustrate many readers, but offers great rewards for those who connect with it, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.

This coming week I’ll be in Chicago for the biennial meeting of the American Association of University Professors participating on a panel with some fellow fellows at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. I’ll also be in attendance at my friend Dave Eggers’ event at the Old Town School of Folk Music on June 10th celebrating the release of his new novel, Contrapposto.

If there’s any likelihood you’ll be in either of those places, please come say hey. I also keep forgetting to remind folks who may be seeing my work for the first time that you can (and really should) check out my book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.

Have a fruitful and pleasant week all of you.

John
The Biblioracle