Book 10: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

I will probably use my dying breath to defend fanfiction.

That’s hyperbolic, but I do feel very strongly about fanfiction as a subversive space and as a legitimate literary genre.

For one, it’s been around in our literary history longer than it’s had a name. Much, if not all, of what we read and celebrate in Western canon is fanfiction. Paradise Lost is fanfiction. Dante’s Divine Comedy is fanfiction that references yet another fanfiction: Virgil’s Aeneid, which was fanfiction of The Iliad. Shakespeare’s plays are fanfiction—even RPF, in some cases.

Even Disney movies are fanfiction, in that they are retellings of fairy tales that are basically AUs in some cases. The Emmy Award-winning web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a Pride and Prejudice modern AU. Fanfiction is everywhere.

Secondly, modern fanfiction culture—fanfic that is written by fans and posted on the internet or in zines for other people’s free-of-cost consumption—is representative of how we’ve always shared and altered stories, and the genre has its own tropes and traditions, like every literary genre.

What makes fanfiction extra special is that it’s also subversive—it challenges capitalism and publishing norms and is a space where people can write themselves into stories produced by a culture whose mass media largely ignores marginalized identities. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, once said, “Fan fiction [sic] is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.”

I read somewhere that, way back at the beginning of the internet, fanfiction was called “speculative fiction.”^[1] Whether or not that’s true, it is what fanfiction is all about: People speculating about familiar stories. “What would it be like if…?” “What if this character was…?” “What if instead they did…?” “What if they were FIREFIGHTERS IN SPACE?” “What if these characters, who are actually firefighters in space, were kindergarten teachers who fall in love?”

Books like The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes are kind of where those spaces—the historical appropriation of familiar stories in literary fiction and subversive reimaginings of the text in “fanfiction”—meet, to grand results.

Book 9: Monster: The Perfect Edition, Vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa

SPOILER ALERT! This is not a spoiler-free blog. In this entry, I’m talking about Monster, which is a mystery/suspense manga. Because of its genre, Monster relies on certain plot points being revealed at key moments in the narrative. If you ever plan on reading it, I suggest not reading this entry.

Additionally, since I have only read the first volume, I would appreciate it if commenters refrained from revealing future plot points in the series. I wouldn’t care if the point of suspense stories wasn’t the feeling of suspense. But it is, so don’t ruin my reading experience, please.

You have been warned.

Book 8: A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

The first poems I ever wrote were songs, because song lyrics were the only poems I was familiar with for a long time. In school we were taught about rhyme and meter and stanzas, and that all sounded like music to me. And also I couldn’t write a sonnet to save my life.

Hank Green once complained, in episode 14 of the Dear Hank & John podcast, that he doesn’t like poetry because of the way it sounds when people read it aloud (which strikes me as funny because he’s a musician and he should know what’s up). In the early episodes of the podcast, he was only just being introduced to poetry and had only begun to think about it. After mentioning the rhythm in the way John reads poems, John points out to him that he has “hit upon precisely what it is, which is that poetry is rhythmic. Poetry is musical.”

The way we read poetry aloud is a very precise way of reading, because, as John says a few minutes later, ”the language is precise and the language is chosen and it has a rhythm to it.”

This is what makes poetry so satisfying, for me. That preciseness of language. The rhythm. It’s like breathing.

Poetry is like breathing.

Book 7: Black Heart, Ivory Bones edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. And overbold I may be accounted, for though I have been a lover of fairy-stories since I learned to read, and have at times thought about them, I have not studied them professionally. I have been hardly more than a wandering explorer (or trespasser) in the land, full of wonder but not of information.”

…As Tolkien wrote in his essay “On Fairy Stories.”^[1]

People often ask me what kind of stories I like to read and write, and I never know how to answer. I generally like everything I read, and I feel like I read a variety of stories. Usually I say that I like magical realism, though I don’t consider myself very well-read in it, to be honest, nor in fantasy.

But it occurs to me now, after reading this compilation, that the kinds of stories I actually like are fairy tales.

Book 6: Harry Potter and the Millennials by Anthony Gierzynski

In college, my friends and I decided to start a tradition. In order to relax before finals week, we watched Fern Gully.

The tradition didn’t take (we did this maybe twice in four years), but it was interesting to me that we all knew Fern Gully and had nostalgia for it, especially when a lot of the other movies I watched as a kid were apparently too obscure. (Ketchup Vampires, anyone? Sometimes I really wonder about the things my parents let me watch…)

We mused on our nostalgia and attributed our environmental consciousness to the lessons from Fern Gully. And I started to think about how the media I’ve consumed has influenced the way I see and interact with the world.

When I was in third grade, my mother was trying to get me to read more. She heard about Harry Potter from another mom, who said the language of the book was awesome and that the book was a joy to read aloud to her kids. I was skeptical, but I picked it up and then never put it down.

I never really considered Harry Potter to be one of those books that had a profound effect on my worldview, even though I was (and am) a super fan and much of my life has revolved around Harry Potter. I made friends through mutual love of the series. One of the most intimate moments I can remember of one of my high school friendships was when we went to the midnight release of the seventh book and then sat in the parking lot in silence to read it. I still ask people what their Hogwarts House would be, as though asking for their astrological sign.^[1] When I visited the UK, I scrambled to buy last-minute tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and forced my friend to go on a detour to King’s Cross so I could take a photo at the gimmicky Platform Nine and Three Quarters. I regularly return to the series, and I’m still discovering new things about it.^[2]

Book 5: Black Panther Vol. 1: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I didn’t start reading American comics until around 2013, when my friend introduced me to Gillen and McKelvie’s Young Avengers series. Until that point, I had only read Japanese manga. American comics always seemed inaccessible somehow. I avoided them for the same reason I avoided Naruto or Bleach—the length of the run was much too intimidating and I tend to favor character development and actual plots, something that long-running TV shows and graphic novels seemed to me to lack.

I’ve since gotten over all of that, obviously. Now I’ve read quite a bit of Marvel comics, and I also know that independent publishers exist.

All this to say that I am largely unfamiliar with Black Panther, aside from the issues I read during my completionist read-through of the 2006 Civil War event. (I read every single tie-in.^[1]) At the time, T’Challa was recently married to Storm, and they were both trying really hard to diplomatically navigate the mess that was Civil War.

Being king is messy.

Book 4: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

In 2013, I asked my paternal grandmother about our family history, and she told me what she knew in a series of letters. I had been curious for a few years, but it was only when she revealed that she had friends in Japan that I finally asked. If my family had friends in Japan they had never told me about, despite me living in Japan, what other interesting pieces of our history were they hiding from me?

In one of her early letters, she wrote, in her cursive scrawl, “I think you are wise to ask about our lives now. Grandpa and I and my brother Robert have been talking about our parents and their lives and wish we had asked more questions. Now there is no one to ask.”

When my maternal grandfather passed away in 2014, I realized that I knew very little about him, aside from the fact that he was adopted and used to threaten to eat my shirt buttons. (They were very shiny. Now I will never be certain that I’m not part some type of dragon that eats its hoards.) I don’t know very much about my maternal grandmother either; she was never much of a letter writer like my dad’s mother. Everything I know about my mother’s side of the family, I have learned from my mother.^[1]

I’m lucky enough to be able to trace my family history back into the past, at least a little bit. My paternal grandmother mentioned that she has a copy of a family tree somewhere, all the way back to people living in Wales, though our last name is an anglicized German last name. There are some parts of the past that have been lost, but with some research, I could probably fill in the holes.

Book 3: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

I have never read a John Updike novel, but I’ve read a few novels about American suburban families. The two that come to mind are The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and At Risk by Alice Hoffman, both of which are about families dealing with the loss of a child. Celeste Ng’s book Everything I Never Told You, then, is not alone in its contemplation of a grieving family. In his video “Let’s Talk about Books,” John Green says of Ng’s work, “I really think we should be talking about Celeste Ng’s books in the context of other great chroniclers of American Suburban fiction, like John Updike.”

So no, it’s not alone. And yet this book feels deeply personal to me, in a way that books I’ve read about suburban families never have. The Lee family is a mixed-race Chinese American family, and their experiences are wholly American. I can’t speak to the Chinese American experience, so I won’t. I’m just going to talk about families.

Book 2: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

When I was in high school, “feminist” was a dirty word. We were all about “humanism” and “equalism,” as though those things aren’t compatible with feminism and can possibly be a replacement for it. Toward the end of my second year of college, I started to secretly think of myself as a feminist. I couldn’t tell anybody, though. It was still, even in some places at UC Santa Cruz, a dirty word.

I don’t think I really started to understand intersectional feminism until I went to Japan. I think it came with a greater understanding of cultural differences and sensitivity. And when I moved back to the ‘States, I really began to educate myself. I made mistakes, and I still make mistakes. I’m not perfect. I’m a bad feminist.

Just like Roxane Gay.

Book 1: Uptown Thief by Aya De Leon

At the Berkeley Book Festival a few years ago, there was a panel called From Bodice Rippers to Trailblazers: Feminism through Romance. Despite never having read a romance novel in my entire life, the description of the panel excited me. I am always up for supporting other women in creative work, and I was curious how romance novels could be feminist.

I had this bias because of my only previous exposure to romance novels. A friend of mine read a lot of fantasy romance, and one day I picked one up from her shelf and read the description. The main character was a queen, but the only way she could keep her throne was by giving birth to an heir, and she had to decide between three male suitors.

Um. What.

As much as I wanted to be open to it and not criticize a genre written by and for women, I could not bring myself to be interested in books that clashed with my values. Really? A woman can only stay in power as long as she has a baby? Really? That book’s description really turned me off (no pun intended) of romance novels for pretty much ever.^[1]

Until that panel.

The authors at the panel read from their novels and talked about how romance is a much-degraded genre, and it was all very eye-opening. Not every romance novel was like that one I picked up off my friend’s shelf! Romance novels could have feminist values! There could be romance novels that even I might enjoy!