Why Read Old Books?

Do you ever finish reading a book and immediately want to talk about it with someone?

Whether I love a book or hate it, I often finish with a huge desire to yap about it…or hear someone else yap about it. Do they hate the same things I hate? Did the scenes that moved me also move them?

Usually, my medium of choice is Goodreads reviews. But this summer, when I re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith in my snatched moments of free time but then spent long days harvesting grass seed and couldn’t peruse Goodreads immediately, I thought:

Wait a minute! I should listen to a podcast!

I’m not much of a podcast listener for some reason, but harvest is the one time out of the year when I become one. So I looked up the book and found a podcast of four women discussing books they’d read as children that stuck with them.

Perfect!

Because there are so many “stick with you” moments from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Like the time a rich girl came to Francie’s school with the most beautiful doll the girls had ever seen, and said she wanted to give her doll away to one of them. And the girls, though they clearly were desperately longing for that doll, didn’t go up and take it, because the experience of taking charity in that way was so humiliating.

Or the way Francie’s father was such a complex character⁠—an ideal father when it came to loving, emotionally understanding, and supporting his children, but such a failure at providing for his family. 

Oh, so many things to discuss! I eagerly pushed “play” on the podcast.

The Discussion of Race

After some brief banter and explanations about when they first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the podcast hosts launched into an extremely in-depth conversation about race. This was a surprise, because it seemed clear to me that the big theme of the book was poverty, and that seemed the logical place to start. 

Still, the book does have an interesting racial context. It takes place in Brooklyn from the 1900s through World War I, and Francie is surrounded by people from many different countries. Her maternal grandparents were from Germany and her paternal grandparents were from Ireland, but she considers herself “American” because both her parents were born in the USA. Of her classmates, she is the only one with this distinction.

Everyone in Francie’s neighborhood has racial prejudices against everyone else, and slurs are not uncommon, but almost everyone is what we would now consider “white.” The group that’s “othered” the most is the Jewish people, but there’s a complex dynamic there⁠—in some ways, Francie’s peers dislike the Jewish people, but in other ways they see them as “better” than themselves. And the Jewish people look down on Francie and her peers. 

Then there are a few cultures, such as the Chinese, that Francie rarely interacts with but is fascinated by in a way that is potentially a little demeaning.

So overall, although race isn’t shaping the characters in the book the way poverty is, it’s still an interesting aspect to talk about.

Or so I thought.

But the podcast hosts didn’t seem interested in discussing the fascinating nuances of how race was viewed in Brooklyn in 1912. Nor did they seem interested in exploring how the thoughts and attitudes of back then influence modern thoughts and attitudes.

No. Instead, they were trying to answer one basic question: when it comes to race, is this book GOOD or BAD?

And this, frankly, baffled me.

Now look⁠—I’ve grappled with racism in old books quite a bit, and I’ve read books by authors who were clearly racist. But Betty Smith does not come across as racist at all. Francie is just a young girl, seeing what she sees, and trying her best to make sense of it. Anything in it that would be “racism” today is just Francie observing her local reality.

And to their credit, the podcast hosts recognized this to some degree. But their ultimate assertion was that Betty Smith, while trying her best, was ignorant of the “right” racial beliefs. And that felt, to me, a bit demeaning. Especially given all of Smith’s fascinating insights in the book.

The hosts got really hung up on the slurs. I should note that the characters never said slurs for black people in the book⁠. In fact, black people weren’t really in the book at all, as far as my memory serves. But there were slurs for Irish people, the Jewish people had slurs for non-Jewish people, etc. And using them was fairly common in that time and place.

But the podcast hosts thought they were quite jarring for our modern age. There should be an annotated version of this book, they said. With footnotes explaining the context of the slurs⁠—that in that particular time and place, that’s how people spoke.

“What the bunnyslipper?” I said out loud to no one but the dusty fire extinguisher next to me in the combine. I was so baffled.

Has reading comprehension really fallen to this new low?

Do people today need a footnote to tell them what was common vernacular in that time and place? 

Can’t they just…read the book and see that it was common vernacular in that time and place?

Depression-Era Brooklyn

Adding to my irritation during this segment was the fact that they kept referring to the time and place as “Depression-era Brooklyn.”

Excuse me. The years were stated multiple times in this book. Even by the end of the book, they were over a decade away from the Great Depression. There are four of you on this podcast. Did no one pipe up and say, “Um, excuse me, the depression was in the 1930s”? Or look it up afterwards and have a little “oopsie” note in there?  

I was probably more irritated by this than I should have been. When combined with the blatant skipping over of the poverty angle in the book, it made me think, Wait, are you assuming that if there are poor people in the book, it has to be the Great Depression?

The Discussion of Feminism

After exhausting the topic of the race, the hosts moved on to the next point of discussion. Is this book feminist?

Now, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has many nuanced characters, most of whom are women. And it definitely deals with the grand topic of what it means to be a woman, as Francie is coming of age in the novel.

So, as far as these things fit into the “is this book feminist” question, some interesting thoughts were discussed.

But again, instead of having a nuanced discussion about the complex characters and the reality of being a woman, particularly a woman in poverty, the podcast hosts had one goal: to decide if it was GOOD or BAD.

And when that discussion was finally over, and I thought we might finally get into the meat of the book, the hosts said, “And now our final question: Would you give this book to a child to read?”

The New Religion

As irritated as I was by the way the podcast hosts refused to grapple with the hard, complex, nuanced questions in the book and instead endlessly discussed whether it was “good” or “bad” on a few very specific metrics, it felt familiar.

In a religious context, such as the Mennonite world I grew up in, this type of “review” is common. Someone reads the book and then makes a judgment. Does the theology match our theology? Is there too much romance and kissing? Is there anything verging on fantasy? Is the language pure and clean? Is it GOOD or BAD?

And if there’s anything iffy that’s not iffy enough to be branded as BAD, it’s treated like the podcast hosts treated Smith’s depiction of race. We can forgive the author for being a bit spiritually deprived. They might not have been taught what we were taught. We just have to make sure everyone knows that we ourselves believe the right spiritual things, and are not putting our stamp of approval on those parts of the book.

Yes, the podcast felt like I was listening to a group of people from the Church of Not-Racist Feminists deciding whether to allow A Tree Grows in Brooklyn into their church library.

Why Do We Read Old Books?

The whole experience made me realize that my motivation for reading old books is not necessarily the same as other people’s motivations for reading old books.

I mean, I guess it’s the same in some ways⁠. We all wanted to read an objectively good, interesting book that happens to be old. But it seemed important to these hosts to deliberately read through the lens of modern morality and social norms.

Whereas when I read old books, one of my main objectives is to gain context about our modern morality and social norms.

I’m not interested in a footnote in an old book explaining that they didn’t understand all the racial nuances that we have now. 

No, I want to read the old book to better understand the racial nuances we have now. Because everything we believe now came from somewhere, or is a reaction to something, and for me, the best way to understand has always been to read old books.

I often hear people say massively ignorant things about the past, and I think, do people not read old books anymore?

But now, after listening to this podcast, all I can think is, do people care about reading critically? About nuance? About learning more about rich human dynamics that don’t necessarily have easy answers?