Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • No More Author Events Please

    Local author Renée Rosen discussed her most recent book Let’s Call Her Barbie in a conversation with another local author Shelby Van Pelt at the Harold Washington Library Center last week.

    Rosen was personable, and shared interesting information that would appeal to anyone who read her book. Van Pelt was well-prepared with a list of open-ended questions that encouraged elaboration and allowed for responses.

    I just couldn’t understand why I was there, and left before the Q&A could start.

    I should have expected from the event description that the “conversation” would center upon Rosen’s new book. I just don’t know why these conversations appeal to anyone, and why the library would continue to sponsor these.

    These events reflect a cult of celebrity that fetishizes authors and writing as ends rather than means. As such, book tours are marketing campaigns — come for the celebrity, leave with a purchase — that seem more concerned with increasing sales than promoting ideas.

    Contemporary society is already too saturated with advertising for me to donate an hour to endure even more, especially when I leave with little more than I could have gotten from consuming the content on my own.

    I realize that I’m the minority on author events. I actually overheard someone praise this specific event at one of my book clubs this past weekend.

    I certainly am not advocating for the decontextualization of ideas, and believe in the need for historical and conceptual contexts. I’m just less interested in authors, and seen enough to know that production processes are idiosyncratic.

    I am also sympathetic to the forces felt by my librarian friends, who might have mixed motivations, and have to make compromises for the greater good, including the relevance of libraries. I just wonder whether they might be limiting efforts to reimagine libraries in contemporary democratic societies.

    A better event would be one that asked Rosen to use her research and experience for something more than the book she already wrote. For example, she could have been asked to elaborate on the effects of Barbie upon the cultural zeitgeist or to consider the ways that toys reflect the politics of their creators.

    Anything that involved an argument, or offered a position or a perspective that couldn’t have been obtained from her book, would have been worth the forty-five minutes I sat in the sparse audience on that cold February night.

  • My Bike

  • A Need to Read?

    Gloria Edim’s (2024) new memoir is a project in search of a problem.

    The book is a series of thematic chapters loosely organized in chronological order. These offer clusters of experiences, and the ways that reading helped her think through and about these.

    Edim’s claim to fame is the the Well-Read Black Girl organization, which began with a birthday t-shirt from her ex- that enabled her to escape her social isolation and connect with others. She used these casual conversations to launch a book club with friends, which she has developed into an organization that uses storytelling to advocate for social change.

    An account of its origins, and a justification for such a life, might make for relevant reading. The latter could be especially engaging in this era of digital culture, and its attendant challenges to previous justifications for reading, and the humanities.

    The problem is that it never quite gets there. Instead, it focuses more on who Edim has become and how she got there, which is obviously important to her but not necessarily at least as the way these are treated in this book to others.

    A second problem, which emerged after I finished it, is missing information. The timeline is somewhat unclear although I had attributed that to artistic choice. However, it omits details that if included could create challenges at least to the story as presented and promoted in it.

    A good example is her missing father, and he and their subsequent reconnection in Nigeria play prominent parts. However, the book is somewhat unclear that he had previously left for Nigeria, and that her mother and she had reportedly accompanied him when she was younger and frequently visited him, which suggests a somewhat different perspective on for example the house he built there, and left after his death for her brother and her.

    This issue, which is more a challenge for the genre, has little impact on the central limitation. That for me is how books justify their existence, and made this one less satisfying than I expected and hoped.