Last month a San Francisco bookstore announced that it would no longer carry Joanne Rowling's books because of her anti-transgender campaigning. This caused some concern, some of it disingenuous, as I argued at the time. I didn't mention this bit, but it's an excellent example of the way people distort things, deliberately or not:
On Monday, Booksmith provided a list on its website of fantasy books similar to the “Harry Potter” series for readers who are interested in alternatives, sparking some backlash and a debate about whether bookstores should make decisions about which books their customers can access.
“So you’re going to curate your selections to only sell books by authors that you agree with politically,” one commenter wrote on social media. “Good to know. I’ll be shopping elsewhere.”
Recommending some books rather than others doesn't deny "access", nor does suggesting alternatives; bookstores and libraries do both, and uninterested customers can ignore them in favor of what they do like. Ask a clerk or a librarian if you don't know where to look.
Which reminds me of a recent thread from Twitter/X, intended to explain why guys aren't reading books anymore. "Exhibit A", a display of current fantasy fiction:
There has been a lot of fussing over the alleged shortage of "literary fiction" by straight white males nowadays, and I've been meaning to write something about that. As numerous writers have pointed out, it's not even certain that there is such a shortage; the alarmists have not cited any actual data in support of their claim, and have been openly impressionistic about it, it's just how it seems / feels to them. But I'll try to return to that issue some other time.
I'm not very interested in the kind of fantasy fiction on display in the photo above, and I've read a fair sample. It's not because it's girly, but because I'm put off by the preachiness and New-Agey spirituality common to the subgenre, and the formulaic though professional storytelling. I'll keep on sampling, though, because some of it made a powerful impression on me: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) for example, and Victoria A. Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor (2018). Both authors have published more work set in their respective universes, which I've enjoyed, but The Goblin Emperor keeps drawing me back; I've already read it three or four times. The trouble is that there is so much being published, and fantasy isn't the only area important to me.
I've given up any reservations I might have had about the ethics of boycotting Rowling's work, though, now that she has urged a boycott herself, of the British retailer Marks and Spencer for having a transgender employee in the lingerie department. I'm not going to try to disentangle the facts from Rowling's agenda in the case. The point is that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ... goose.
And when I began writing this post I remembered something else about Rowling: she adopted the initials J. K. instead of her actual name when the first Harry Potter book was published, at her publisher's urging. The idea was that a girl's name as author might alienate potential boy readers. Not unreasonably for an unknown debut writer, she went along with the ploy. (Playboy magazine pressured Ursula K. Le Guin into using her initials when they published a story by her in 1968, thirty years before Harry Potter.) Her treacherous chromosomes were never really a secret, and the series became a worldwide phenomenon. It's significant, though, that when it came time to publish her first non-Potter novel, she chose not only another pseudonym but an unambiguously masculine one. The first Robert Galbraith book didn't sell well until she, uh, came out as its author. Not to make too big a thing of it, but Rowling seems to have a penchant for gender disguise to mislead potential readers. Shouldn't she stop pretending that she can be a man for paraliterary purposes? One could probably make a case that Harry Potter was the wedge that led to the invasion of commercial fantasy by women, and terrifying, emasculating book displays that cause men to give up on reading altogether.
