Last week, I went to see Gabrielle Zevin speak in a very, very large and very, very fancy theater. It was the first time in decades that I went to a book event that was in the kind of room that plays host to symphonies and dance troupes and Bianca Del Rio. I kind of gaped, to tell you the truth. Most book events that I’ve been to have been in cramped bookstore basements, sweaty bars, or, on occasion, a spacious store with chairs for everyone. This was the kind of place where you want to take pictures of all the lighting. It was a reminder, and a much needed one, of how much bigger a book can make the world—something you read alone, weeping gently on the sofa, transformed into something hundreds, maybe thousands of your neighbors have also experienced.
Zevin was speaking because Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was Portland’s “Everybody Reads” pick, and this was the culminating event. It was my first such event, and everything, including the cheering high school students, was new. Zevin was a delight (how could I not immediately warm to someone who admits they had been mispronouncing Oregon Trail for two years straight?) and gave a talk that seemed half polished and half off the cuff in the best possible way.
And she spoke in a way that was clearly meant for everyone. She talked about video games, as is inevitable with that book, but she talked about grief and disability and time and failure and love and the importance of stories where love between friends is powerful. She talked about her life and she talked, tartly and rightly, about elder statesmen of literature who turn up their noses at contemporary writing. Her book was an inspired pick for a community read; there are so many ways into that story, and so much to take out of it. Most of all it is a book about two people who communicate most clearly in the unexpected medium of video games. “Only connect,” Zevin said, quoting E.M. Forster.
Lately, I have been reading a lot of books that are probably not for everyone. Generation ship novels in verse, novels about pacifism and war, novels about novels that change their stories every time someone new picks them up. None of these things are inherently not for everyone; I think any book can be for any reader under the right circumstances. But we so rarely know, really, if we’re finding a book under the best or worst circumstances. They turn up, we read the back, and we keep reading or move on. I might not have finished Oliver K. Landmead’s Calypso on a different day, but I started reading it in a dim hotel room on a chilly evening, and it transported me. I wanted to keep being transported. Sometimes I put off reading a book for years. I’m always in search of that right moment.
Listening to Zevin, I thought about what makes a book for everyone. I don’t mean everyone in a bestseller list way—who knows how many of those celebrity-book-club, nonfiction-trend, famous-person memoir books ever get read? I mean the kind of book that can draw packs of teens, writers, parents, readers, and everyone else in a community into a theater on one rainy Thursday afternoon. Is it the presence of universal themes? Approachable prose? Intergenerational narratives? A certain sense of transparency, like you can see what the author is doing even as you appreciate it?
Portland’s Everybody Reads picks are all over the map: fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels. A Tale for the Time Being; Evicted; There, There; The Book of Delights; Good Talk. It’s a really wonderful list. And if I were being forced—or forcing myself—to figure out what connects them, I might say that they are, generally, wise books that offer so much to talk about.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Helen Oyeyemi, for example, writes wise books with so much to talk about, but they are tricky and open to interpretation (her latest is, essentially, about that very subjectivity). Some readers (me) can’t get enough, while others bounce off, hard. I like—I love—a lot of books that I would never try to convince any group of everybodies to read, sometimes for plot or theme reasons, and sometimes precisely because I don’t want to talk about the book with a stranger. There are books that feel like they’re meant to be shared, and books that you hold close to your heart. Sometimes the reading experience is meant to be shared, to be shouted about. Sometimes it’s just for you.
Most good books probably fit the bill of being wise and discussable. But the everyone books—there’s something else, something ineffable, something I genuinely don’t know if I ever want to put my finger on.
I suspect, though, that a lot of SFF readers have thought about this, or about a topic in this general vicinity. Who hasn’t found themselves trying to explain—with a mild to severe level of exhaustion and/or frustration—that not all SFF is like the one disagreeable book a friend read and did not like, causing them to back away from the genre forever? Who hasn’t heard a genre skeptic say, “I don’t usually like fantasy, but I liked this book?” Haven’t we all tried to find just the right book, the one that would demonstrate to a doubter exactly why the genres we love are so big, so brilliant, so compelling? And what a task that is. Do they want happy stories or stories that spring from a deep well of trauma? Ensemble casts or chosen ones? Secondary worlds or magic at home? Hot villains or trustworthy paladins? Should we make a survey, try to figure out what the best book to convert someone to SFF is? Is there one true SFF novel for everyone? (I kid. Mostly.)
I have already spent a lot of time thinking about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a book that feels like it has one foot in the SFF section even though it’s entirely about real life. (Perhaps it’s the games that Sadie and Sam create, which are sometimes magical.) Is that part of its broad appeal? That it doesn’t transcend so much as bring in genres, drawing them into one big, wise embrace? It’s not for us, but it’s also for us. It’s for so many kinds of “us” that there were all those people in that big, fancy theater, all one big “us,” an everybody I never expected. I read that book like it was for me, personally, and then I experienced it like it was for everyone else, too. What a dream for a book. What a dream for a reader.
