The Stacks

I love this podcast. I always learn something new. Traci isn’t afraid to tackle hard subjects and hot takes, has the best guests, and is a really great interviewer!

Even when I disagree with Traci’s hot takes, I LOVE this show! I’ve gotten turned on to some fresh authors and listening these last couple of years has encouraged me to embrace my inner gleeful hater 😊😊😊

I have enjoyed the stacks podcast for a long time, but I honestly don’t understand why it chose a book that so many of us literally cannot read or discuss for our mental health. Did the Lolita episode engage with the topic of what reading this book might be like for a CSA survivor? No. Did it conflate the choice not to read or platform a book with censorship? Yes. Did the episode discuss how regardless of whether an intellectual reading of the book can indict the mundane tyranny of American society, this book has been consistently and radically misread, as evidenced by the cover, and the fact that Alice Munro’s daughter’s abuser specifically cited this book when blaming a 9-year-old girl for him abusing her by calling her “a Lolita”? No. When a book is so actively harmful to CSA survivors’ mental health that when it is assigned in college classes my students and myself routinely need to ask for an alternate assignment (CPTSD is no joke!) and we sit here and just wish that more people pushing this on us understood this basic reality, and wonder why we constantly have to read the perspective of perpetrators over and over and over again in all of our classes; and when a book is, after 70 years, chronically and actively misread, mis-marketed (my copy has a Vanity Fair review blurb on the cover calling it “the greatest love story of our time”) and repeatedly used as justification by perpetrators, then do you think for a moment about maybe, just maybe, I could pick something else, other than some thoroughly canonized white man’s novel that has been read plenty enough before the Stacks announcing so loudly and clearly how little it cares about CSA survivors being able to be part of its book club? Hope you all who weren’t raped as children had fun intellectualizing the aesthetic value of this chronically-assigned, syllabus mainstay, never-in-danger-of-going-out-of-print book so beloved of perpetrators and so terrorizing of us survivors.

I love this show and Traci :)