Great American Read Result Is a Yawn... But the Process Was Eye-Opening

After months of voting for PBS's Great American Read, readers  have named To Kill a Mockingbird America's favorite book.
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Shocker. 

The result had to be something that scads of people have read and loved, and even though The Great American Read was about finding America's favorite book, not finding the great American book, it seemed likely that Americans would stump for an American work (although the top ten out of the one hundred books up for voting was 50/50 American and British books). Given the continued prevalence of To Kill a Mockingbird on middle school and high school syllabii, its accessibility, and its themes that speak to what feel like distinctly American issues with near-universal applicability, it would have been *wild* to me if To Kill a Mockingbird had not come out at the top of this list of one hundred titles.* Just, statistically, how could it have been otherwise?

Which leads me to the question I asked myself when I first heard about The Great American Read, which was, why bother? "Harry Potter, Rings, Pride and Prejudice, possibly Jane Eyre and Moby Dick will all be high on the list," I thought to myself as soon as I heard about this summer of voting for "our" favorite read. "Gone with the Wind probably on the list, and Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird wins." Here are the top ten, per PBS's site:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. Outlander (Series)
3. Harry Potter (Series)
4. Pride and Prejudice
5. Lord of the Rings
6. Gone with the Wind
7. Charlotte's Web
8. Little Women
9. Chronicles of Narnia
10. Jane Eyre
11. 
    
12. 
    

 Gatsby was #15, Moby Dick #46.

Look, I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. It's not that I have some remarkable magic finger on the pulse of bookish America or something. My point is that you don't have to have your finger on the pulse of anything to predict this with decent accuracy.** If you have any sense of what Americans are made to read in school and what has historically resonated with a lot of them, this list was utterly predictable. And there's been some confused noises along those lines from some bookish media. (A recent episode of the Book Riot Podcast gives a decent discussion of the Heh? aspects of The Great American Read as a project. Minute 18:18-26:55.***)

But I wonder if focusing on the result, on the "winner" after all this voting, is maybe to look past the value of doing something like The Great American Read the way PBS did it. They didn't just do a poll, giving out a list and asking people to pick their favorites. They made a series of documentary programs about the one hundred books on the original list and organized community and library events related to the book list. I've watched most of the documentaries (if there were community or library events in my area, I didn't hear about them), and while those TV episodes certainly aren't the most inspired bits of documentary television you're ever going to see (it's mostly talking heads, with the occasional kinda neat animated graphic), I  enjoyed watching them, and most of all thrilled to see people talk passionately about the books they love. The episodes feature interviews with many authors, both about their own books that are on the list and about other books on the list that have meant something to them, as well as interviews with other book-adjacent folk discussing why various books are important to them personally, or culturally, or historically. The documentaries aren't terribly nuanced. You won't, for instance, find much considered criticism of any of the books.**** However, the point wasn't to consider these works fully, but to convince you to read them. And as much as I also find the idea of voting to name Americans' favorite read a little pointless (see the top ten list), impossibly fraught logistically (who actually voted? who had the opportunity to vote? in what ways was the voting system that allowed you to vote for each book once a day for months being gamed? which huge swathes of readers didn't have their voice represented because they don't watch or pay any attention to PBS?*****), and rather reductive (the one hundred books they started with is a much more interesting and representative list than the final "winner," or even the top ten), I'm glad The Great American Read was there trying to convince me to read these books. After watching the various episodes of the show, I am inspired to read (or in two cases, reread) these eight books:
  

1. Ghost
2. Tales of the City
3. Bless Me, Ultima
4. The Great Gatsby
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany
6. A Separate Peace
7. Dune
8. The Joy Luck Club
9. 
   

Some of these I'd never heard of before, some I'd known about but just never heard anything that prompted me to read them, some I've read and thought I was done with. Maybe that was the point all along. To encourage us and inspire us to read, and to read beyond our current horizons. And that is no bad thing.


What did you think of The Great American Read? Did you watch the show? Did you vote? Is your favorite on the top ten list? 


*According to The Great American Read finale episode, To Kill a Mockingbird started out on the first day of voting in the number one position and never fell from it.
**I think the only genuine surprise in this top ten is Outlander, a book I love (I've only read the first of the series) and which I know a lot of other people do too. But I would never have thought of it in this context. There's been some speculation that there was a concentrated effort by Outlander fans to vote as often as they could to get the book/series as high up the rankings as possible. *shrug* The Great American Read voting system was designed in a way that clearly allowed (even encouraged?) people to do just that, so the fact that some people may have done so feels like a legit part of this particular voting process. It does make me really curious to see data on numbers of unique votes for each of these books though. Like, if Outlander received 100 votes (small numbers here for convenience), how many of them came from the same ten people over time? I'm curious about this for every book on here; Outlander just brings the question to the fore. The finale claims that it took at least 56,196 votes for a book to make it into the top twenty list, but they said nothing about how many (or whether they even know) of those were unique votes.
***For a correction to/discussion of the statement in this episode that the top ten list is 100% white, see the next episode of the podcast. It's to do with Diana Gabaldon's Hispanic ancestry.
****If you haven't read Roxane Gay's article in which she explains why she doesn't "harbor reverence and nostalgia" for To Kill a Mockingbird, do.
*****According to the final episode of The Great American Read, over four million votes were received. If every one of those were a unique vote (certainly they weren't, based on the voting system's design allowing individuals to vote many more times than once), that would only be slightly more than 1% of the population of the US. Also, while many of the books by authors of color on the list of one hundred ended up high in the rankings, the fact that the bottom ten of the one hundred books was almost fully books by authors of color was both heartbreaking and telling about whose voices maybe weren't included here, despite the project's clear efforts to make the episodes of the show themselves pretty inclusive.

Identifying the Core Books of My Heart (and Head)

As I continue to think about books and how I want them, their physical selves, in my space and what I want that to look like, I keep coming back to the idea of the "core" books that hold meaning for me. These core books are those (relatively) few out of the thousands in our house that are the absolute most important, the ones that, if I had to reduce my book collection to only what would fit in one or two bookcases, would be the ones sitting in that honored space.

I can't quite imagine actually reducing my collection that far (unless out of necessity brought on by circumstances, such as dramatically reduced living space), but it has been helpful to me to think about what those collections would be--and to create them digitally through the collections function on LibraryThing. I have created four collections there:* Core Heart, the clutch-them-to-my-chest reads that are my absolute favorites; Core Head, the books that speak more to my head than my heart that I would feel somehow lost without; Secondary Heart, chest clutchers that just aren't quite important enough to me to be core; Secondary Head, ditto for those "head" books that I could probably do without but would very much rather not. 

This has been a fascinating process, though one that constantly threatens to descend into the depths of absurd hairsplitting. (Is Harry Potter's Bookshelf head or heart? Okay, but is it core or secondary?) I find that if I stop thinking about it so hard, most of the books I've considered (many of my books are definitely not even in contention) fall pretty solidly into one of those four categories. The trick is to stop thinking. That's the hard bit.

Some things I've learned by doing this so far:

*Most of my Core Heart books are things I read early in my life--if not in childhood, then certainly by my early twenties. This feels both right and slightly sad. (Cue Kathleen Kelly quote about childhood reading.) Right because, well, childhood reading. Sad because *sobs* why can't reading be like it was when I was twelve anymore?

*Despite the fact that I mostly can't seem to read series these days, a lot of the books in my Core Heart collection *are* series (Harry Potter, the Little House books, the Minnesota Christmas romance novels, The Lord of the Rings (that one is not really a series, but in the sense that I read three books back-to-back-to-back.) I suspect this points to my love of character over any other element of fiction. 

*Books I've read more recently that end up in Core Heart are more likely to be graphics-based than not (comics, graphic novels,  picture books).

*The line between Core Heart and Core Head is not terribly logical, but it is the distinction I have the least trouble feeling. JRR Tolkien's collected letters are Core Heart; C.S. Lewis's are Core Head. Pride and Prejudice is Core Heart; the rest of Austen's novels are Core Head.

I still have some work to do on the collections--every other day or so a thought strikes me in the shower or over breakfast: "Did I put such-and-such book into one of my core collections?!" And of course they will get fine-tuned over time, with books shuffling among collections, new reads getting slotted in, and perhaps, the odd book falling from favor entirely.

What books would you put in a core collection? And would you divide them differently than I have (or not at all?) 

*If you're, like, super interested, you can navigate to those collections on LT through my profile.