Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the first book that swept me away when I was a kid. You probably know the story: a money-poor but well-loved kid wins a golden ticket to visit a factory run by a peculiar little man whose invitation has dramatic consequences. My third-grade teacher read a chapter to us every day. Needless to say, this was my favorite part of school while it lasted, and I mourned the loss of that world when the book was over.
Around the same time there came into my life beloved books about a mouse (Stuart Little), a swan (The Trumpet of the Swan), and a farm girl's friendship with a piglet and a spider. Soon after that I fell into repeated readings of a story about a girl whose family raised yellow Labrador retrievers. I can't remember the title, but it was the first time I encountered the word "bitch," as it is used to refer to a female dog. Today that probably would be enough to get it banned, but this was a gentler era, when reason occasionally prevailed. At the time, the book transfixed me because the family lived in a way that seemed so foreign compared to my suburban life. Therefore, it was fascinating.
My childhood books owed their magic to their ability to whisk away readers to lives different from their own. I would never be a poor boy whose four grandparents shared a bed. Nor a mouse, nor a swan, nor a farm girl nor a child whose parents took pride in raising dogs for show. But because there were writers with the power of empathy to tie characters to universal experience, I could be all of those kids and even the animals whenever I dwelled within the pages.
Today, you can still find plenty of books that take readers to other worlds. More and more, though, we keep being told in various ways that what we really ought to want is to read about ourselves — that is, our particular demographic. We're often served writing that seems to prioritize surface-level "relatability" or "authenticity," or validation of a reader's particular burdens or life experiences.
We see this in picture books for children that are less story and more self-help.1 We see it in controversies over who gets to write fiction about certain kinds of characters.2 Authors who use deep research along with what they know about humanity to write outside direct experience see their manuscripts put through "sensitivity" reviews by readers who in some cases put the kibosh on publication. And we hear over and over again — largely in book clubs, occasionally in reviews — praise for "relatable"3 characters or disappointment in those who were insufficiently so.
I'd like to return reading-for-adventure to its pedestal.
As the holidays approached last year, I kept bumping into a table at a local bookstore that was piled high — week after week after week — with copies of The Wager, David Grann's mega-best-selling nonfiction narrative about a well-documented shipwreck in the 1700s. The cover features a painting of a war ship being tossed about on a furious sea.
Every time I passed the display, I imagined the book's ideal reader being essentially some version of my father while he was alive: an older guy whose reading tastes tilted toward manly stories.
Elsewhere in the store, the runaway success novel Lessons in Chemistry also was still being pushed hard, and I knew I was the target market for that story: brilliant young female scientist succeeds despite a sexist system that wants to keep women in their place. But I also knew that I had made a valiant effort to read Lessons in Chemistry before figuratively hurling it out a window at about the hundred-page mark for reasons I won't go into out of respect for those who truly enjoyed it. I am not here to harsh your vibe.
Anyway, the fifth or sixth time I paused at The Wager, I finally gave into curiosity and bought it, if only to see why a nugget of curiosity inside me thought this book and I might be a good fit. Even as I paid, I was prepared to see it slide from my to-be-read pile to the never-to-be-finished stack. What a nice surprise when I read the first few pages and found myself hooked.
Grann, who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, is a master at collecting mind-boggling amounts of reported detail and stitching it together with a novelist's sense of strong narrative. The Wager recounts the doomed voyage of a British naval squadron that set into the Atlantic in the mid-1700s to find and capture a Spanish ship loaded with treasure. The journey enlisted the talents of career-oriented naval leaders, skilled seamen, and random men yanked off the streets and forced into service.
And that journey was doomed, as it required the ships to sail around Cape Horn, where wicked storms regularly turned the sea into a meat grinder. During the voyage, the HMS Wager, equipped with 24 guns and 120 seamen, eventually was wrecked. Survivors became castaways on a small island; mutiny — and murder — ensued. Unbelievably, though, two small groups from the ship eventually made their way back to England, only to face trial for what had taken place in the Lord-of-the-Flies months of misery they had endured.
Grann does a great job of bringing forth key and secondary players, whose voices can be heard thanks in large part to diaries many of them kept. They recorded not only what they experienced — scurvy, typhus, burials at sea, wind-shredded sails and starvation — but also what they were thinking as they were pushed beyond the brink.
At the risk of making the book sound like a relentless drag, I must add that Grann adorns the story with fun facts and details about seafaring life, including our present-day connection to previous centuries through familiar turns of phrases. (I confess I'd never thought to wonder what "dead reckoning"4 was. Now I know.)
Throughout this extraordinarily well-told story, there are plenty of opportunities to consider big ideas, including the strange human tendency to sacrifice life and limb in pursuit of petty victories. We meet a sea captain whose ambitions outpace his reasoning skills. And we can't help wondering what it must have been like to literally have to tie ourselves to the mast to keep from being blown into raging waters.
All the characters in The Wager are, unsurprisingly, men, which contemporary culture might suggest would place the book outside the interests of the middle-aged, middle class female reader. The men onboard the Wager were about as different from me as they could be, if you don't count considerations that are common to all of humanity: hope, fear, resourcefulness, poverty and wealth, pride and honor. To name a few.
Yet when I think about what books draw me in, I do indeed count all of those things — while usually discounting the need for characters to be like me in superficial ways, such as gender, race, age and upbringing. Essential needs and desires common to all humankind are what makes it possible to imagine across differences of circumstances.
The best writers know this. Maybe publishers and critics will catch up soon.
About the art
“That Book is My Favorite Place” was designed a while ago as one of several options for a mural commission I was working on. I loved the design that was ultimately chosen, but this was my personal favorite among the options, because it describes the emotional and imaginative movement I feel around books. I’ve done a few versions of this design since then, and turned it into a print with a vertical (rather than wayyyy horizontal) orientation. There are still a couple in the Etsy shop.
Notes
This kind of thing is getting more common on the picture-book shelves. Not a bad intent, but can we achieve it in a less didactic way?
Look no further than American Dirt and its wild controversies.
The headline tells it all right here.
Dead reckoning for dummies like me.
Thanks to this review, Karen, I’m going to recommend The Wager to my book group.
I read The Wager first and then my husband read it after me after I kept exclaiming how good it was and reading snippets out loud. We both loved it, so well written.