Last week, the bookish internet erupted in the biggest scandal since that Miami mayor tried to close all the libraries.  If you weren’t watching, book reviewer Emily M. Keeler published an article consisting entirely of quotes (long ones, not short-out-of-context quotes capable of being misinterpreted) in which acclaimed Canadian author David Gilmour essentially revealed himself to be a racist misogynist.  I’m not going to go into detail about what he said, but under cover of giving a tour of his personal library, essentially he stated that he only teaches his University of Toronto students books by heterosexual white men, since that’s what he loves and he can only teach what he loves.  (LOLWUT?)  Gilmour disdains other Canadian writers, women, and inexplicably, the Chinese.  (I repeat: LOLWUT?)  Gilmour also, confusingly, explained that he prefers to teach books by heterosexual men, real guys’ guys – which is why he teaches one short story by Virginia Woolf (such a man!), as well as works by Truman Capote and Marcel Proust (so heterosexual!) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (such a guy’s guy!).  (Interestingly, he doesn’t give even a mention to Ernest Hemingway, which is who I think of when I think of heterosexual guy’s guy white male writers.)

Gilmour then made a bad situation worse by issuing an “apology” that in no way apologized.  Instead, he just repeated all of the offensive things he said to begin with, claimed that the (female) reporter was “trying to make a little name for herself,” and then grudgingly concluded that he was sorry if people were offended.  (One more time: LOLWUT?)  Book Riot, one of my favorite bookish websites, published a few responses to this crazy escapade: a hilarious GIF-filled response by Amanda Nelson, and a thoughtful, well-reasoned piece by Brenna Clarke Gray, who incidentally has a Ph.D. – which Gilmour doesn’t – in Canadian literature.  Boom.

It’s Gray’s piece that inspired this post.  In her post, amongst several thought-provoking questions (like: isn’t it interesting that the article was published by Random House, which is not Gilmour’s publisher, a mere two weeks before the short lists are announced for a major Canadian literary prize in which Gilmour is up against several Random House writers?), Gray makes the following statement:

Here’s the thing: David Gilmour has unsavory, but not uncommon, views about literature. I know lots of people who would never voice these opinions but whose bookshelves tell a similar story.

Hmmm.  Amidst a very intelligent, thought-provoking piece, this is probably the sentence that provoked the most thought from me.  I stopped gagging over Gilmour’s sexist philosophies and ran straight to my bookshelf to see what story it would tell, stopping only to snap two Instagram photos of my current shelves (I’m working with the built-ins in my current rental), exactly as they were in that moment, to force me to be honest with myself.  Observe:

(Please ignore the baby toys.  They were just there.  They’re not part of this experiment.)

This is my “fancy bookshelf.”  Meaning: this is the shelf where I keep my prettiest hardcovers.  The forest-green leather Dickens; the complete works of Shakespeare, Austen, and two of the Brontes, and the hardcover classics from Barnes & Noble, Modern Library and Everyman’s Library.  (And a few well-loved mysteries.)  Most of this shelf is given over to English literature: the aforementioned Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and Brontes, plus Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie.  But I’ve got some other stuff in there too: Americans (Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne…), Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) and some world lit, like Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (which I haven’t read, but am itching to – it’s long, and that’s all that’s delayed me) and Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales.

Here’s the other built-in.  Comedy on the top left; children’s on the bottom; a mix of non-fiction, paperback classics and literary fiction.  A glance at the shelf reveals a mix of male and female authors (maybe a few more women than men, but I think pretty balanced overall) from the following locales (this is just a sampling):

• England – Daphne du Maurier; Virginia Woolf; Ian McEwan; Anne Bronte; J.K. Rowling
• The United States of America – Harper Lee; Dorothy Parker; Toni Morrison; Maya Angelou; Henry James (American-British); Maud Hart Lovelace; Madeleine L’Engle
• Canada – Margaret Atwood; Yann Martel; L.M. Montgomery
• Ireland – Edna O’Brien
• Russia – Leo Tolstoy; Anton Chekhov; Nikolai Gogol; Mikhail Bulgakov
• France – Collette; Alexandre Dumas
• Italy – Umberto Eco
• China – Dai Sijie (actually Chinese-French); Sun Tzu
• India – Salman Rushdie (British-Indian)
• Portugal – Jose Saramago
• Czech – Franz Kafka
• Brazil – Paolo Coelho

Okay, that’s just at a glance; I’m sure there are more nationalities and ethnicities represented, but I’m squeezing this post into naptime.  I learned two things from this quick exercise: (1) my reading tastes are pretty diverse, and (2) they could be more diverse.  I could do with more African literature (other than Isak Dinesen, who isn’t actually African although she lived in and loved Africa), more books about the African-American experience (I have that experience represented a little bit through Maya Angelou, who I’ve loved since high school, and Toni Morrison, who I have on my shelf but who’s still in the to-read pile), and more books from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.  I do tend to read a disproportionate number of American, Canadian, and European writers – as a British lit lover, I’ve always known I had that tendency.  But I’m quite proud that I’ve branched out beyond Austen and the Bronte sisters.  I can do better – we all can – but now I’m not worried that I’m only giving lip service to diversity in reading tastes while my bookshelf speaks otherwise.

I haven’t read any of David Gilmour’s work.  And I’m not saying I never will.  I’ll try to do what Margaret Atwood (a FEMALE, CANADIAN writer!) would advise, and separate the person from the literature.  (He’s not high on my to-read list, though; I have a lot of other books to get through before Gilmour would cycle to the top.)  But I’d encourage anyone who considers him- or herself to be an avid reader to take a look at your bookshelves, do a little soul-searching, and ask yourself: Am I open to new perspectives and experiences in my reading?  And whatever your response is, work on doing a little bit better… because while some of us (cough) can do a lot better, we can all do a little better.