You Gotta Have Taste

When it comes to books, my taste is excellent.

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When it comes to books, I have good taste.

Better than good. My taste is truly excellent.

This is not a humblebrag or even a straight-up brag, it’s essentially a fact. I know what books I like and I can tell you why I think the books are good. This is the core of my success as a professional recommender of books at this newsletter and in my column at the Chicago Tribune. When someone sends me their list of five recently read books and I make a recommendation, it is not a stab in the dark. It is a combination of calculated and intuitive response based in the fact of my excellent taste in books.

It’s important to not confuse my declaration of having good taste with a claim that my taste is somehow universal. There’s plenty of books that I think are great that other people don’t. When I talk about taste, I am not talking about infallible judgement, but instead something deeply personal. My taste in books is mine. And also, it is very good.

Speaking of taste, here are two statements which some will find contradictory:

1. I have good taste in music.

2. I like the jam band, Phish.

Telling someone who is super into music that you like Phish is like telling someone super into cooking that you like to eat rotten entrails. In some corners, liking Phish is disqualifying when it comes to being able to say you have good taste in music.

But it’s important to recognize that the goal of developing one’s own taste is not to ultimately land on what other people think is good. Your taste belongs to you. I like listening to Phish. I dig the jams. I could cite how they just played four consecutive nights of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden to show that I’m not alone, but who cares? It’s enough if you know why you like something and perhaps more importantly, to not let some kind of outside consensus steer you away from your own taste.

Now, there’s plenty of areas where I have not bad taste, necessarily, but rather no taste, like say…clothes, for example. Beyond looking marginally presentable, I can’t muster the energy to care. At times I’ve been decked out in some nice threads that everyone was very complementary about, but in those times, I didn’t feel like I was expressing my sense of taste, I was performing a role based in someone else’s taste. Ultimately, dressing like that for me isn’t sustainable. Perhaps with practice I could cultivate a look that both reflects my taste and makes a statement to others, but the expense and effort just doesn’t seem worth it to me given that I spend the vast majority of my days alone in front of computer or reading books.

(Happily!)

My pre-existing beliefs about taste made me particularly interested in a recent podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the imminently available Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

I’ll let Ezra Klein’s introduction of Chayka on the podcast serve as a summary for Chayka’s book.

I’ve been wrestling with related questions while working on my next book as I try to understand and articulate why anyone would accept the inhuman output of a GPT trained as a great aggregator of text over writing generated by the unique intelligence of a human being.

One part of my theory is that across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfortable in its familiarity. This is what I observed in how students are taught writing by following templates like the five-paragaph essay. No one believes the products of that process are actually, you know, good or interesting. What they are is explicable, and easy to grade. The real work of learning to write is variable, messy, and fraught with failure. In order to avoid that mess we’ve streamlined the process down to elements that don’t require students to actually learn to write. Neat trick, that.

Over time, we lose touch with our sense of taste, or in extreme examples that taste matters at all. This is, of course, bonkers - What do we have if we do not have our taste? - but I don’t think any of us is immune to the effects that algorithms have had on what we’re exposed to. Who doesn’t check Rotten Tomatoes before seeing a movie? How many of us let Spotify curate our listening in whole or in part?

Let’s say you’re interested in a book and you check it out on Amazon, see that it only has three stars in aggregate (pretty low for the platform) and decide not to read it? In each of these cases, we’re substituting algorithmic aggregation for our own sense of taste.

This is not de facto bad, and in many cases it’s quite helpful. If I’m in the market for a space heater, I’d like to know which one gets the highest average rating, or if there’s a bunch of one-star reviews with titles like “Spontaneously Bursts Into Flame.” But books, music, film, art, are not the same thing as a consumer good like a space heater. Unfortunately, aggregation encourages us to treat them that way.

Part of the original conceit of my book recommending schtick was as a rebellion against aggregation. The very best stuff that is most aligned with our own tastes is spiky, not smooth. It has features that will repel others that are perfectly designed to get their hooks in you. I ask for people to tell me the last five books they’ve read because it gives me an insight into their taste.

Last year I wrote about how I knew that Jen Beagin’s novel Big Swiss was going to be a good fit for me based on the one-star review of someone on Amazon. I could tell that the offense this reader took at the transgressive nature of the humor meant I should head out and buy it immediately, and I was right.

Klein and Chayka’s conversation is particularly interesting to me because as a couple of dudes 10-15 years younger than me, they were raised on algorithms in ways I wasn’t, and once had greater faith in the power of aggregation than I’ve ever held. Recently, though, they’ve both come to distrust the algorithm and appreciate what it means to pursue one’s own taste. Chayka gives a particularly interesting description of what it means to have taste:

In my observation many young people have not been encouraged inside school writing contexts to work on understanding and articulating their taste as part of their practice of critical thinking. For example, I would start all of creative writing classes with a little treatise on art mostly cribbed (with attribution) from Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? in which I would say something along the lines of “art is to be experienced, but not necessarily understood,” and I was often struck by how odd that sounded to students inside a classroom context. They’d only been asked to explain, and the idea that they could have a personal experience with a text seemed strange.

Even in non-creative contexts the notion that someone would be interested in their taste seemed foreign. One of my most commonly assigned writing experiences (collected in The Writer’s Practice) was to have students write a review and students loved it because it felt liberatory. You mean someone cares what I think?

Yes! When I’m teaching writing, that’s all I care about. It’s pretty much all I care about as a reader too.

Aesthetic v. Ideological Critique

I sometimes get irritated when younger people turn first to an ideological critique of something they think is “bad,” not because I disagree with the ideology, but because I think there is a stronger case to be made on aesthetic grounds.

“You shouldn’t punch down” has become a kind of truism of comedy that is sometimes applied as an ideological critique, and it’s mostly true, sort of, I guess. Under this framework, Dave Chapelle’s obsession with trans people can be critiqued because of his targeting of a marginalized group, and this critique is correct.

But when the critique remains rooted entirely in an ideological space, we are now in a tug of war about who is “powerful” in the equation, which is how you get defenders of Chapelle saying his voice is a necessary corrective to the “radical trans agenda.”

Those of us who live in the world of observable reality know that this is cockamamie, that it is merely an excuse to continue to heap scorn on the out group these people don’t like, but now we’re in the midst of an unproductive tug-of-war over a question (Who is powerful here?) that has nothing to do with the core object of examination, an attempt at creating comedic art.

An argument rooted in aesthetics gets to make the case that in addition to its cruelty, the bigger sin of those jokes is that they aren’t funny. They are, as

Parker Molloy

shows at her newsletter, fundamentally “lazy.” These are jokes that don’t work as jokes, what is worse than that?

This is a good spot to plug Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic That Makes It Work, which looks at a number of different examples like Chapelle’s recent turn, and how the deeper issue isn’t necessarily the target of a joke (e.g. “punching down”), but the lack of magic in some of those jokes.

I tried to make this point last year in looking at the devolution of Roseanne’s comedy where her audience now applauds, instead of laughs at her jokes because rather than delivering a spark of recognition at a previously unarticulated truth, she instead is merely confirming her audience’s pre-existing beliefs.

Roseanne’s previous style was cranky and acerbic. Now it’s merely hectoring. Chapelle is in a similar space, where he once was viewed as a kind of comedy oracle, now that he has come in for criticism, he’s desperate to prove to people that he’s right. Above all, it’s dull.

If there’s anything I want for young people as part of the reading and writing they do in school it’s to allow them the time and space to develop their tastes. These are obviously not solo missions. Our tastes are shaped by the people and the world around us, but the world around us doesn’t need to be the entire world. It could be our friends or family or the small group of people who are into this one very specific thing who may introduce us to other specific things. Our taste is ultimately rooted in our beliefs, or even deeper in our values. The process of exploring one’s taste is part of knowing one’s self.

This is not easy work in today’s world. As Klein says in the podcast, “the algorithmic world privileges sameness.” To avoid the influence of the algorithm requires a conscious effort of resistance. Getting a book recommendation from your local bookseller or librarian or friend or me is a small act of resisting the algorithm.

Once you have this new work to encounter, you need to be willing to trust your own reaction, and to understand that reaction. Over time that process will reveal your taste to you, and with enough practice you will become increasingly attuned to it.

I love it when someone writes to tell me that they enjoyed a book I recommended they read, but I’m equally enthused when someone writes to tell me why they didn’t like a book I recommended. It’s extremely unlikely that they’re going to change my mind about my own reaction, but their articulation of their taste helps me better understand my own taste.

Win-win.

Believe it or not, genuinely cultivating your own taste is a blow against a culture of consumption.

This is why I got very excited to see that Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims, published by Two Dollar Radio has been announced as one of the finalists for the prestigious Story Prize, alongside Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Lee and The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon.

Look, I don’t know any intimate details about how Two Dollar Radio operates, but I’ve read enough of their books to know that when it comes to what they publish, “taste,” rather than commercial potential, is driving that train. They have a mission to publish what they like. There’s something undeniably attractive about an outfit that is confident in what it wants to publish and then delivering that to its interested audience without first worrying about the potential size of that audience.

This act is simultaneously dangerous and commonsensical. Dangerous in that you never know if your taste is going to be shared by a sufficient number of people to make for a viable operation. Commonsensical, because what other choice is there?

I actually sense something of a backlash against algorithmic aggregation starting to rise. Kyle Chayka wrote a widely circulated piece in the New Yorker on “Why The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore” which looks at how the experience of being online with others via social media increasingly feels just plain bad. The kind of engagement that social media thrives on - external attention from strangers - is a nice dopamine hit, but is ultimately not as nourishing as what I’ll call “absorption,” the opportunity to go deep with an object or idea of our own fascination, to follow the thread of obsession to discoveries of our own.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune this week I investigate what’s doing in the “hockey romance” subgenre, and I’m not sure exactly what I’ve experienced.

At Ms., the “Feminist Know-It-All” has “reads for the rest of us.”

LitHub has 22 new books released this past week.

I biffed every single question in this New York Times quiz on literary Paris.

Substack removed a handful of overt Nazi newsletters that they were convinced violated their terms of service, but have also vowed not to change their existing policy on content moderation. This move and the shady actions of Substack co-founder

Hamish McKenzie

leaking private conversations to a sympathetic writer in order to undermine Casey Newton have led Newton and his

Platformer

team to decide to leave the service. You can read the whole story here. McKenize makes it very difficult to trust the leadership of the platform, and it seems inevitable that more shoes will drop. Substack seems sort of determined to privilege the edgelord, anti-woke point of view either because of a sense of shared values or as a business calculation, which makes me believe that my point of view is ultimately going to become unwelcome here. If McKenzie’s goal is to affirm a kind of neutrality toward different points of view, he’s doing a very bad job of it, alienating many writers who are already here. It seems increasingly inevitable that this newsletter will be migrating elsewhere, but for the moment, my available bandwidth is dedicated to editing this book manuscript.

From McSweeney’s this week, a holiday-themed piece by River Clegg and Evan Waite: “Martin Luther King Would Have Wanted You to Buy This Timeshare.”

Recommendations

1. The Boyfriend Lessons by Jenna Fiore
2. Quiet Street by Nick McDonnell
3. The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
4. The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by T. Jenkins Reid
5. How To by Randall Munroe

Agnes S.

I think Agnes will take to the essentially good-heartedness of Katherine Heinz’s Early Morning Riser.

1. Kantika by Elizabeth Graver
2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
3. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
4. Proofs and Theories by Louise Glück
5. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Gregory G. - Clarksville, TN

I think the mix of history, drama, and close observation of the world in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is a good fit for Gregory.¹

Okay, judging from my requests inbox, people have voted for the occasional requests-only midweek newsletter. I’ve got it on the agenda for next week. If you’d like your custom book recommendation, click below.

I need your input…

Have I mentioned that I’m working on my next book? Seems like it. I never liked the working title, so the folks at the publisher (Basic Books) have put their heads together based on responses to my first draft and come up with the following possibility:

More than Words: What Generative AI Can’t Teach Us about Writing, Reading, and Being Human

Since I have over 5000 readers here, I figure I could get a little free focus group feedback. How does it sound to you? Would you be interested in such a book? What appeals or doesn’t appeal about the title?

Thanks once again for giving some of your attention to my work. It’s very much appreciated, as are subscriptions because they serve as a kind of vote of confidence in what’s happening in this space.

Bonus recommendations post coming Wednesday. By typing these words, I’m committing myself to following through on the commitment.

JW

The Biblioracle

1. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income is $25.40 for the year.