The Value of Books

Or why I'm partial to literary fluff and overdone tropes. . .

This post is a rabbit trail, sparked by “The Stalin in the Soul: How Authors Become Their Own Censors to Please the Market” by Mr. Clifford Stumme, which showed up in my Substack feed this morning. The original post is excellent and worth the read and consideration. It explores the question of writing to please the market at the expense of an author's (or producers) vision and intention for their work. 

My own thoughts have honestly nothing to do with the original material outside of the question of what is the value of things that last? What about the things that are a flash in the pan - here to satisfy an appetite in the moment. Things that will quickly be forgotten. 

While I take off into a world of memories way out in the left field, please don’t read what I say as a criticism of the original. Because really, this post is my own rambling exploration of my experiences and my own biases regarding a facet of literary value as a reader. The original post was written to writers.

In fact, similar to whisper down the lane, my words here are a garbled inspection of a different subject matter entirely, which was prompted by a reference to “writing to the market”. And I’m grateful. I hope my words can be a jumping point for someone else to explore their own values. 

Also, I make references to my religious upbringing - please, please, do not project this on to any conservative religious families you know. Some of them might be like my parents, but others, while sharing similar language, understand it and apply it very differently and in a much more wholesome manner. 

cw. Brief references to suicide ideation. 

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There is important conversation to be had on the value of literary works. Within that, I admit to having had a very small minded bias, which I have kept to myself for years, of believing that modern works, or worse, mass generated genre fiction, hold inferior value by virtue of its production. And I have held this bias even while consuming said genre fiction in large quantities. And look, there’s a lot to be debated, no doubt. There’s also a lot to learn, there are things I don’t know, and questions I don’t know how to ask simply by virtue of lack of exposure. But this is my reckoning with the place that books written to market have served in my own life. 

I was sitting in the office of my second therapist - the one I saw specifically for my EMDR sessions - and we were building a safety plan following some active suicide ideation I’d had the previous weekend. I’d picked my date, picked the method, and started to plan the letters I would leave to my husband and children. And once I finally got out of the horror show that was my headspace that weekend, I was terrified and sought help. I wish I could remember the exact question the therapist had asked me, but all I have is this lingering impression that the question had something to do with picking something worth living for, something enduring - something that went beyond the needs of the day. I balked. Hard. Everything inside me seized up and my insides simultaneously froze over and caught fire. 

I should probably explain. 

We’re going to take a trip down memory lane. Please suspend all logical thought and critical thinking skills - if you bring those with you, you’ll fail to appreciate the ideologies that dictated my life for nearly twenty years. 

I grew up with parents who had the “gift of discernment”, a spiritual gift in short supply. So short, in fact, that despite attending six different churches in six years, and in three different states, we hadn’t met another single individual who likewise possessed this gift. Thank goodness my parents had it. We lived in a world full of deception and evil and we attended churches with good people who were woefully ignorant about the worldly compromises they were making. Worse yet, we lived in bodies and minds with actions and needs that could not be trusted. 

Was I really tired if I was not fainting from exhaustion? Was I honestly stressed if, despite constant dizziness and migraines and extensive hair loss, and a loss of sensitivity to temperature (at 16, mind you), if I could still move? If I could find a moment of happiness in the hell that we lived in, then I obviously wasn’t giving everything that could be possibly given and more must be demanded. In the name of family. In the name of “multigenerational vision”.

My life was built entirely around the idea of my parents' spiritual legacy, and stripped of anything I could call my own - including my own sense of hunger, or exhaustion or loneliness. Every decision made was made in reference to the potential impact it would have upon future generations (some weird variation of the butterfly effect), and every conviction was built on the idea that any deviation would rapidly degenerate into its worst possible extrapolation. There was no middle ground. We had a family vision and family core convictions which we regularly taught and stressed to us as the truth and to walk outside that might be “okay” for other people, but my parents “really couldn’t see how” - which, if the only discerning people couldn’t see the goodness in something - how good was it really? How much more likely that some horrible conclusion was coming down the road for these other people and their worldly choices? 

I think a sermon I heard at this time really sums up what the experience was like. The sermon was on Proverbs 30:17, “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” Now, I think most people would come to this and start asking questions, “what is a proverb?” “Are proverbs hard and fast rules?” “what does it mean, to ‘mock his father’ or ‘despise his mother’?” “Are there exceptions to this proverb? If so, what contexts might be an exception?” But when you have been made aware, again and again and again, that your father and mother possess this rare and essential gift of discernment and that you positively do not have it and cannot develop it, questions are a threat to your safety. Thinking for yourself is opening yourself up to deceptions you cannot possibly unravel and your soul will suffer. For the modern American reader, perhaps the idea of the soul suffering doesn’t seem like a heavy threat. But when your entire life revolves around the spiritual, it's a big deal. The body was simply a vessel to accomplish the greater, enduring work that the soul would either enjoy eternally or else suffer horrifically. 

To be spiritually blind was to invite spiritual discipline - I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Always waiting to mess up, to not see something crucial and to need discipline to set me straight. When you cannot rest, day or night, fumbling about scared of punishment and sick and dizzy from exhaustion, it skews with your perceptions of love and discipline. It becomes impossible to view them with anything with any sort of balance or proportion. All this fear, all this control, was experienced within the context of building something enduring. Something that lasted and held value beyond ourselves, beyond the moment we lived in. 

I think it’s safe to say that I developed an aversion to things that endure. The idea of investing myself in something that went beyond this moment became extremely overwhelming, as well as physically and emotionally distressing. 

This is, to at least some degree, an extreme scenario. When I see people talking about culture or art, or heck, morality, it's not typically with the question of what to do with these kinds of extremes. And that’s reasonable, I think. Although, at some point people like me need the rest of the world to be aware of the extremes.  Maybe we can collectively come up with some sort of dialogue with which to navigate those extremes, or at least some guidelines on how to ingratiate ourselves into the ‘normal’ world. Because the normal world is hard as hell to navigate after all the bullshit. 

Or, you know. Therapy. 

Therapy works. 

Generally.

I digress. The point is this: yes, please, write enduring works. Be aware of the censure of writing to the market. Please, for the love of all that is good, write things that matter. Ask the questions that others are too afraid or too biased to ask. 

But also, please write the kind of fluff that I can get lost in. Things that don’t matter beyond this current moment. Because not too long ago, that fluff, that lack of depth and lack of reach was keeping me alive. 

Anything that had any sort of sobriety, any sort of careful consideration, was extremely triggering as I was unwrapping my history in therapy. Triggering can run a gamut of experiences - from being suicidal, to heavy depressive episodes, to non stop panic attacks that can stretch for days, to symptoms of depersonalization and derealization. I found refuge in being able to bury the voices and the intense feelings in books like Enclave by Ann Aguirre, or the Covenant series by Jennifer Armentrout, and way more romance novels than I feel comfortable admitting to. Sometimes I could drown the screams of “worthless bitch” and “attention whore” that were on repeat in my mind for days at a time, with the snarky wit of Alex, protagonist of the Covenant series. Sometimes I could suppress the illogical fear that paralyzed me by immersing myself in the irreverent voice of Gabriel de Leon in Empire of the Vampire. I could find some semblance of recognition of my own pain in the fanaticism of Chloe and the genuine efforts of Rafa. I could escape into worlds of love and protection and devotion in the works of authors like Tessa Bailey, Neva Altaj, Sierra Simone and Alisha Rai. 

Like all crutches, hiding and burying and escaping were only meant to be used for a time. There are books I consumed during this period of my life that I still love and believe hold their own value- even if the works are only temporary. There are books that are probably complete trash but that I still treasure because they held me together when I was coming apart at the seams. And there are books that I will never read again because they are genuinely that bad*. Most of these books will probably die in a generation or two. And that's okay. They served a significant purpose in the here and now. 

But I’m also really happy to be engaging with enduring literary works. I’m really thankful to have the headspace to start sitting with hard questions, while knowing I can retreat to the fluff of werewolves and fated mates when the inner demons are riding too close to the surface and I just need my thoughts to stop. 

A Heart of Blood and Ashes sits on my shelf near books like Intention. I hold Half Blood dearer than Julius Caesar, but I also really love Julius Caesar. They’ve served their purposes - both the one that surpassed its original audience and the one written to market. 

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*Please note that in saying some of the books I read were trash that I will never read again, I have not given any indication of which books or which authors. In naming a few of the authors I have read, I am not giving any sort of insight into my thoughts on those authors or their works, positive or negative.