Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

This is a great post. When it came out I bought the Wrede for my mother without knowing anything about it (other than its author), and felt deeply horrified when I later encountered the controversy. I even felt compelled to call her and talk to her about it, I remember.

Of course there have been many books that I saw nothing wrong with when I first read them as a child, and thus had to confront later (A Little Princess, Little House books; books that shaped my childhood and that I read over and over and that I still instinctively jump to in my mind when comparing my life to fiction). But there I find it easier to forgive myself for that love -- easier to balance the love with the awareness of the problems. I don't really feel like anybody's requiring me to magically erase the love I felt for a book before I learned to better recognize my privilege and others' oppression. I feel I'm being asked to see what's going on here, to recognize the negative as well as the positive ways that these books influenced me, to maintain this awareness of what's wrong with them before recommending them or doing other work with them. And I do. But I feel I'm not being asked to expunge nostalgic fondness from my reading psyche, because in any case, that's just not possible.

But The Grand Sophy, which I read recently, is another matter. Growing up surrounded by Jewish friends and schoolmates, even if I'd read it much younger I might still have had a problem with it -- I still vividly remember the first time a Jewish friend explained to me the "Jews are greedy" stereotype, telling me about the time he'd been chased by members of an opposing marching band shouting anti-Semitic slurs after they saw him "bend over to pick up a quarter on the field." So when I read TGS I was enjoying it so very much, and then I felt utterly sucker-punched when I got to that scene, just betrayed. But I still loved the rest of it; it was just that one scene! I'm not Jewish (I think you're spot-on in your observation about the difference between being the target of the offense or not); nobody else can morally authorize me to say it's okay to love the book despite its failures. I just have to navigate that feeling myself.

I'd have to say that for me, at least at this stage, that is a more complex negotiation than adjusting my feelings about books I loved growing up -- that is, deciding how to feel about recently-read books that I love or at least enjoy that are also really problematic. Although perhaps it also makes it easier that I never felt the unconditional love in the first place, and I'm perpetually growing more accepting of the notion that I will always be on my guard, that I will very rarely love a book unconditionally again. But there's a grief there too.