The Evolution of Me

okay so this is in fact the crux of the problem. i.e. there isn't in fact a problem, but just the perception of one.

it is the choice and extreme availability of the choices which makes it seem like there's only 1 good book in every 1000. in fact, people have already published ABSOLUTE rubbish and indeed since the very earliest days of publishing there have been poor books. badly written, badly spelled, badly conceived, badly plotted, nonsense. they are Immediately forgotten, never got mentioned outside of their little town, etc. the badly written books from the last 10 years, on the other hand, are on a small printrun of 20,000 copies (not 500), and additionally, are still around - e.g. in your local bookstore or charity shop or social media feed - where you can fret about them.

also (1) - you're worried about whether there was a truly life-changingly good book published in 2025? maybe there was a book that would appeal to YOU specifically as Excellent, and it was written in Korean or Telugu or Bulgarian and it didn't get noticed enough to get translated. maybe this Korean masterpiece did get translated, but only into Japanese and Indonesian. anyway, you will never know. but equally, this may have happened in 1834 and you STILL wouldn't know, unless it got re-discovered - but this in itself takes time, and clearly only a very exceptional book will be still praised 100 years later, at home and halfway around the world.

also (2) acting like the 18th-20th centuries were great for novel-writing and that the 21st century isn't, ignores the situation in much of the world. many "smaller" nations and/or colonised nations, had not started writing Novels in earnest before the second half of the 20th century. novels aren't the only means of cultural expression in the literary field, btw; e.g the first Kyrgyz novel is Uzak Jol (The Long Road), by Mukay Elebayev, which was published in 1936. the next major novel from Kyrgyzstan is Jamila Chinghiz Aitmatov, which was published in Russian in 1958. but they had the Epic of Manas, of course; in contrast, today, about 900 novels a year are published in Kyrgyz, about 60% of them in their own language and about 40% of them in Russian. clearly this is a very robust publishing industry, where it wasn't before. but if you are an English reader you can overlook this situation, and many similar ones across the world's 200 countries very easily.

also (3) we have a tendency to collapse the time periods of the more distant past and experience that past as compressed. oh, there are sooo many great 19th century books? okay, but name a specifically excellent book from 1870. hmm ... maybe it wasn't a 'good year' - or maybe world-class books are rare enough that there's only a dozen or so per century, and therefore it's hardly alarming if you, personally, haven't (YET!) read something extraordinarily good published 2016-2026 (for example). but we valorise the 19th century as the epoch of great literature on the basis of perhaps 40 truly incredible (European) books.

also (4) the whole function of 'Classics' is that the filter of 'educated' public taste has latched onto, and remembered, and analysed, and kept in print, those books which were thought to be exceptionally worthwhile. this cultural filtration needs time. especially if you are waiting for literature written in X country to be appraised domestically, and then gain international notice, and then get translated into your native language. of course the average book you are told you Must Read from 1900-1910 will be better than the average book you would pick up if you chose at random from the list of books published (in English) this year.

also (5) lock in and read a bit more, and you will find (if you read exclusively from the 21st century, rather than the 19th + first half of the 20th) that a. you will find great novels you wouldn't've had otherwise but more interestingly, b., you will discover that, when you read 'classics' more or less exclusively, you train yourself to see many superficial elements of these books, such as the language of the time, as hallmarks of quality, whereas (much of the time), the language may be just older - if you attune yourself to a the contemporary time period again, you may find poetic quality in a different style, and grow to appreciate it as well. MONOTONOUS DIET = NOT IDEAL. Tolstoy is beautiful. it is not the only way to write. (correspondingly, if you read enough 19th century prose you'll stop idolising it and realise that some very good books from the 1860s are also written in fairly unremarkable style, which may not be apparent if you persist in the unconscious assumption that older-sounding = better).

also (6) there's nothing ruining books from the 2020s partly because what you're railing against is most of all, mass literary - and the mass visibility of literacy. people will want to read salacious, trivial, and same-y things. it is okay. you're just more aware of it now because they're saying so out loud, on tiktok / tumblr / etc. we're also writing unprecedented amounts of surreal, formally innovative, very politically enlightened, very culturally rigourous books. go and find them.

Scavengers Reign propaganda

I have found that many people who have not had a trans female or trans feminine experience often have trouble wrapping their brains around the concept of trans-misogyny, so I will offer the following two anecdotes to help illustrate what I mean by the term. Once, about two years ago, I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and a trans woman happened to be walking just ahead of me. She was dressed femininely, but not any more feminine than a typical cis woman. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on a doorstep, and as the trans woman walked by, the man turned to the woman he was sitting next to and said, “Look at all the shit he’s wearing,” and the woman he was with nodded in agreement. Now presumably the word “shit” was a reference to femininity — specifically, the feminine clothing and cosmetics the trans woman wore. I found this particular comment to be quite telling. After all, while cis women often receive harassing comments from strange men on the street, it is rather rare for those men to address those remarks to a female acquaintance and for her to apparently approve of his remarks. Furthermore, if this same man were to have harassed a cis woman, it is unlikely that he would do so by referring to her feminine clothing and makeup as “shit.” Similarly, someone who is on the trans masculine spectrum could potentially be harassed, but it is unlikely that his masculine clothing would be referred to as “shit.” Thus, trans-misogyny is both informed by, yet distinct from, transphobia and misogyny, in that it specifically targets transgender expressions of femaleness and femininity.

The second example of trans-misogyny that I’d like to share occurred at an Association for Women in Psychology conference I attended in 2007 (for those unfamiliar with that organization, it is essentially a feminist psychology conference). One psychologist gave a presentation on the ways in which feminism has informed her approach to therapy. During the course of her talk, she discussed two transgender clients of hers, one on the trans male/masculine spectrum, the other on the trans female/feminine spectrum. Their stories were very similar in that both had begun the process of physically transitioning but were having second thoughts about it. First, the therapist discussed the trans masculine spectrum person, whose gender presentation she described simply as being “very butch.” She discussed this individual’s transgender expressions and issues in a respectful and serious manner, and the audience listened attentively. However, when she turned her attention to the trans feminine client, she went into a very graphic and animated description of the trans person’s appearance, detailing how the trans woman’s hair was styled, the type of outfit and shoes she was wearing, the way her makeup was done, and so on. This description elicited a significant amount of giggling from the audience, which I found to be particularly disturbing given the fact that this was an explicitly feminist conference. Clearly, if a male psychologist gave a talk at this meeting in which he went into such explicit detail regarding what one of his cis female clients was wearing, most of these same audience members, as well as the presenter, would surely (and rightfully) be appalled and would view such remarks to be blatantly objectifying. In fact, in both of these incidents I have described, comments that would typically be considered extraordinarily misogynistic if they were directed at cis women are not considered beyond the pale when directed at trans women.

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

aaaugh - thank goodness for the online guides*, or i'd never have made it past this level! it feels like i've been staring at this loading screen for almost a year....