Surrender vs. Culling

I posted a version of this post a long time ago, but the phenomenon of “culling,” and the alternative of “surrender,” still strikes me as both interesting and inevitable. I opt very strongly for “surrender” for some genres, though I’m quite happy to use “culling for others.

Here’s the original post, somewhat revised.

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Here’s an excellent article at npr.com by Linda Holms.

Surrender, she says, is what you do when you realize that you will never, ever be able to read more than a tiny fraction of the books you would love, and you accept this fact.

Culling is what you do when you declare that all romances / westerns / fantasies / vampire novels are trash and therefore you’re not missing anything when you ignore them. Culling is a psychological trick that protects you from having to acknowledge how much you’re inevitably going to miss.

And Holms says she kind of wonders whether these days there might be a strengthening tendency toward culling:

“What I’ve observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, “All genre fiction is trash.” You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.”

Well, of course, when *I* cull, it works, because all romances really *are* trash.

Kidding! Kidding! I like plenty of romances! It just took me a while to realize that, because there are so many I don’t like.

Of course you can’t read everything, or even a significant minority of everything, and naturally it’s helpful to narrow your attention down to those chunks of everything in which you’re more likely to find things you really do love . . . but there’s no question that every single time you declare a genre or subgenre not-of-interest and ignore it, you’re setting yourself up to miss those parts of it you really would love.

I do think that this is the exact problem — the problem of finding things you’d love when they’re not in genres you’re focused on — that online book review sites such as The Book Smugglers address, and that the need for great (and prolific) reviewers will become more and more important as self-publishing rises and the enormous pool of books we’d love becomes ever more diluted by the far more immense ocean of books we’d hate.

I don’t really follow any book review blogs anymore, because my TBR pile is so massive that I just can’t face adding heaps more books to it. But, at the time I first posted about this, I bought The Sky is Everywhere and Five Flavors of Dumb because of Ana’s reviews at The Book Smugglers blog. Five Flavors was fine, but The Sky is Everywhere was fantastic and definitely one of my favorite books of those I read that year. And I wouldn’t have ever noticed either if I’d declared contemporary YA and YA romances uninteresting — as Holms puts it, if I’d culled those categories. So put me down on the side of just surrendering to the knowledge that it’s impossible to read everything I’d love. 

I, of course, cheat: I draw a massive proportion of the books I read and of my TBR pile from your comments here. It’s quite rare I pick up any new-to-me author in any other way. It can happen, but it doesn’t happen often. This suggests that a pool of social contacts who share your broad  tastes in books is an alternative means of finding books you’d love amid the vast and growing ocean of available titles.

The other main way I pick up titles — this doesn’t happen often — is that I happen to get a promotional email from BookBub or someone when I have nothing much going on and I actually open the email and look at it. Then it’s possible I’ll click through to some book or other and take a better look. I don’t pick up many books that way even if they’re free because I’m long past the stage where I’d pick up a book that looked iffy just because it’s free. I HAVE a giant TBR pile. I hardly read ANYTHING by ANYONE these days. I don’t need or want to pile more books on top. But, on the other hand, occasionally I do pick p a book that way. Then it goes on the “someday” list along with everything else.

However, it’s occurred to me, as I update this post, that it’s also possible to do effective culling — not so much by genre, maybe, but by tone. Like this: I will never like anything grimdark, ever, and there’s absolutely no need for me to try any sample of any book that is grimdark or closely adjacent to grimdark.

Boom! That took out quite a broad swathe of fantasy and a chunk of various other genres, and it was both easy and accurate. I mean, I really don’t see how ANY author could EVER make me like anything grimdark. That’s quite different from writing off a whole genre, or so it seems to me.

However, I basically have no problem acknowledging that I will never read most of the great books I would love passionately. That’s just inevitable. Even more so for games I will never play and TV shows and movies I’ll never watch. Unless someone gets hopping with a youthening treatment that hands me an extra few hundred years, there’s no way, and that’s the way it is.

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