Book Banishing, Holiday Edition (December & January)

I do intend to keep up my monthly book banishings, and delaying for a month allows me to hit one author twice, though perhaps I overstate the significance of this. It's easy to kick out the truly bad books; it's another thing entirely to turn my wrath on the mediocre ones. I don't want to seem beastly, but my shelf space is limited, and with a number of good tomes added over the holidays I must do what I must.


Ever heard of Charles Chesnutt? No? Neither had I when I picked up several of his books for an American literature seminar on "local color". Chesnutt's concern in much of his writing was the complexity of race relations in the late 19th and early 20th century American south, and his novels deconstruct notions of "whiteness" and "blackness" (well before Deconstruction was a notion in literary criticism, of course) from that time. In particular, I'm speaking of his novels The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, both of which I'll be banishing. Why? Am I a proponent of anachronistic notions of race? Certainly not. Am I uninterested in "local color"? Not really, but you're getting warmer. The fact is, the writing is unremarkable outside its historical context. The novels leave me with a feeling of "meh" largely because I don't need to be convinced that definitions of "race" and race relations are complicated issues.


An English department seminar reading list is precisely where these belong—not on my shelf.