“Reading fiction doesn’t help us escape the world, it helps us live in it.”
That is a quote I found at the top of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast website. During each episode the podcast’s hosts, Casper and Vanessa, discuss a chapter from Harry Potter through the lens of a particular theme. Their method results in incredibly generous readings of each text, while also transporting meaning from page to life. It is not about listing wrongs and rights perpetrated by the author or examining abstractions of meaning or style; it is about looking at how a text affects us, and about focusing on what can be learned from it. It feels both optimistic and concrete.
I don’t know about you, but I could really use a little bit of concrete optimism in my life lately.
When I wrote about wanting to read for resistance last week, I didn’t know what that might look like. But as I’ve considered how to approach the task, I realized both that I had a good example in Casper and Vanessa’s methodology, and that I’d done this before.
About ten years ago, my cousin Tara and I read books together that allowed us to continue the discussions we were already having in epic-long emails and letters about the way our ideal world differed so vastly from the one we lived in, and about what we could do to bring the vision and the reality closer together.
We read A Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and were annoyed when Heinlein coped out on providing a concrete plan for the moon dwellers’ revolution (spoiler alert: a fucking computer does it for them). We read Ender’s Game and were (naiveté, incoming) excited by the idea that Valentine and Peter were starting a revolution by posting political screeds on the internet (ha!). We mined these fictions for ideas about how to apply certain values in our lives, and we read each book, without ever explicitly saying so, via the theme of resistance.
So in this series, #readingforresistance, I plan to take a page from Vanessa and Casper, as well as from optimistic-about-the-potential-of-the-internet-past-Nikki, and examine fiction via this and other related themes once again. Because it is true:
“Reading fiction doesn’t help us escape the world, it helps us live in it.”
Let’s read. Let’s fight. Let’s go.
***
There are two options on the table for the first book I put under this lens. The first is Ella, Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, about a girl who is cursed by a very shitty fairy to always obey. The second option is The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed, which is about (plot-level) some teenage girls taking revenge on some teenage dude rapists and (big-picture level) about the experience of being a woman in the United States of Misogyny. Discussions to be publish here, or stop by #readingforresistance or @bookpunks any time on Twitter to chat.
Image from www.anarchistbookfair.ca
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