How Much Are You Like The Characters You Read About?

Summary

Episode Summary: "How Much Are You Like The Characters You Read About?"

Podcast: Book Riot – The Podcast
Hosts: Jeff O’Neal, Rebecca Schinsky
Guest: Laura McGrath (English professor, literary historian, data scientist)
Date: February 25, 2026
Main Theme:
The episode explores how readers' identities (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) relate to the characters they choose to read about. The discussion is anchored by new research into "reader-character identity interdependence," tackled through a large survey, and extended by the hosts’ and guest’s personal experiences and industry insights.

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Overview

The hosts welcome frequent guest and data correspondent Laura McGrath to discuss new findings from a study by Prof. Millicent Weber and Rachel Norda about the connection between readers’ identities and the identities of the characters they read. The conversation ranges from the selection process for books, representation in fiction, publishing trends, personal anecdotes, and the larger implications for the world of reading.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Study & Its Aims

• Laura outlines new research about "reader-character identity interdependence," i.e., how closely readers’ identities match with the characters in their books and whether readers are intentionally seeking out that match or not. (02:19–03:48)
• The research is based on survey data from 3,000 readers across the US, UK, and Australia.

2. Personal Book Selections/Survey Recreation

• Laura puts the hosts through a version of the survey, asking about the most recent novel they read and the main character’s demographics.
  • Rebecca: Kin by Tayari Jones (main characters: Black women, one straight, one queer but appearing straight; set in Louisiana).
  • Jeff: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (main character: retired cishet white woman; set around Baltimore).
  • Laura: The Ten Year Affair by Erin Summers (main character: cishet straight white woman; set in upstate New York). (05:14–09:14)
• They discuss why they picked these books, balancing logistics, author reputation, recommendations, and personal connection to the content.

Notable Quote:
“I was excited about the form of the book, the kind of sliding doors and two timelines. But also this book is just unfortunately or for better or for worse, I'm not sure, a little close to home for me.”
— Laura McGrath (09:14)

3. Reader Identity and Book Selection

• The hosts and Laura reflect on whether they intentionally seek characters similar to themselves.
  • General agreement: They value diverse perspectives and don’t purposefully select “mirror” characters, even though sometimes their picks incidentally resemble them.
  • Reflection on professional bias—many Book Riot listeners/readers and the hosts are more self-aware about these choices than the general public. (12:14–14:39)

Notable Quote:
“Part of Book Riot's mission and something that's baked into the way that I read now... is engaging with other modes of experience.”
— Rebecca Schinsky (12:14)

4. Industry and Demographic Data

• Discussion of industry stereotypes: “men read about men, women about women, and women are more open than men.”
• Complications introduced by intersecting identities (race, class, gender, ability, etc.); citing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. (16:50–19:39)
• The publishing industry and bestseller lists often don’t reflect true diversity—Rebecca points out that while middle-aged white women are stereotyped as the ‘average’ reader, buyer demographics are complicated by stats (e.g., Black women’s book-buying rates). (15:21–16:06)

5. Overview of the Study’s Methodology & Demographics

• The study asked about participants’ last book read, character demographics, book setting, and related context but didn’t focus explicitly on why the book was chosen beyond open-ended questions.
  • 35% of survey participants: BIPOC
  • 67%: women or gender non-conforming
  • 14%: LGBTQIA
  • 42%: disabled or chronically ill (30:57)

6. Survey Results: Character Representation

• 47% of main characters were women or gender non-conforming, even though 67% of respondents belonged to these groups—overrepresentation of male characters relative to the reader pool. (32:10–32:24)
• Only 23% of main characters were BIPOC, lower than the percentage of BIPOC participants (35%).
• 10% of main characters were disabled/chronically ill (seems high compared to fiction's baseline, per Rebecca).
• LGBTQIA numbers were more aligned: 14% of participants and of main characters.
• There’s significantly more diversity among secondary characters, but quality of representation (“mere numbers” don’t guarantee meaningful roles). (34:55–35:41)

7. Why Readers Pick What They Pick (or Don’t Know Why)

• Most participants reported choosing books for reasons like “a good story” rather than consciously seeking identity match or contrast.
• Hosts and guest note the power of subconscious biases—most readers, especially casual ones, select books based on availability, what catches their attention, or recommendations, not on character identity per se. (21:09–22:14)

Notable Quote:
“I think a lot of this is subconscious, if it’s happening at all.”
— Rebecca Schinsky (21:43)

8. Market Forces, Algorithms, and The Role of Availability

• Discussion of “ambient awareness” (what’s available in Costco, Target, airports, etc.) and how it shapes selections.
• The role of BookTok and other platforms in surfacing books—examples include The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo attracting a wide audience because it’s not overtly pitched as queer, allowing “invisible” representation.
• Algorithms amplify selection bias and can make it difficult for books from underrepresented communities to get traction, despite increased market availability. (52:23–53:39)

9. Tension Between Representation and Business

• It’s necessary—but not sufficient—to increase books by and about marginalized people; business and marketing dynamics, as well as the need for intentionality by readers, play a role.
• Concern: Once someone is “on the bestseller flywheel,” it’s hard for new, diverse books to break through unless they also become phenomena.

10. Moral/Empathetic Value of Reading Diverse Stories

• Debate over whether reading really makes people more empathetic: Laura notes that “reading doesn’t make you more empathetic” by default, but a powerful story can shift one’s sense of self.
• Conservatives often give “a much more powerful story about what literature can do” (e.g., book banning assumes books can transform identity), whereas academics may downplay literature’s transformative potential.
• Reading expansively can broaden perspectives, but we “know a lot of well read assholes”—being well-read does not guarantee open-mindedness. (45:31–48:44)

Notable Quote:
“I know a whole lot of well read assholes. Reading doesn't make you more empathetic…what am I doing other than selling literature short and selling its capacity to change us and to expand our world so short.”
— Laura McGrath (45:31)

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Study Conclusions & Implications

• Race is the strongest predictor for “reader-character congruence.” BIPOC readers heavily favor books with BIPOC main characters (and sometimes white characters); white readers overwhelmingly choose white protagonists.
• Gender also predicts, but less strongly: women/gender-nonconforming people read about similar characters more than men do, but also read more expansively.
• Marginalized readers generally show greater openness to difference, but in aggregate, the field still skews heavily towards white protagonists.
• For real change, production (i.e., what’s being published and promoted) remains critical, but so does understanding of selection/availability effects—and the reinforcing role of algorithms.

Notable Quote:
“It is perhaps not terribly surprising, but…it is so extraordinarily useful to actually have receipts...when we talk about these sorts of assumptions, particularly around demography and particularly around identity and taste, because this is a whole mishmash of vibes.”
— Laura McGrath (23:57)

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Highlighted Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Rebecca: “Things people like are good actually, Jeff.” (11:43)
• Jeff: "I think an interesting chasm in readers is people who think about their reading at all...versus just picking up a book." (20:00)
• Laura: “I think our idea of what a good story is is likewise culturally conditioned...It's entirely impossible, I think, to separate them from our own subject positions.” (42:22)
• Rebecca: “I care about living in a world where people are interested in and curious about the world and other people's experiences...books are a vehicle for that way of engaging with the world.” (47:47)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:48–09:14: Survey recreation and book discussion
• 12:14–14:39: Do readers seek out “mirror” characters?
• 30:57: Survey participant demographics breakdown
• 32:10–34:55: Main and secondary character representation data
• 38:39–41:26: Availability, marketing, and the impact on what’s read
• 45:31–47:47: Do books actually make us better people?
• 49:32–52:20: Conclusions: selection congruence and the imperative for more representative fiction
• 53:37–54:36: Algorithms, BookTok, and the rise of “stealth” representation

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Podcast Tone and Style

• Conversational, nerdy, “wonky” but accessible; a balance of humor, data, and critical analysis.
• Frequent asides and playful banter, e.g., jokes about Warby Parker glasses and “sad literary men.”
• Deeply self-aware, often meta, reflecting on their role as book media figures and the complexity of both the industry and their own reading lives.

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Conclusion

While the publishing industry has made steps toward diversity and readers sometimes value exposure to different identities, selection heavily reflects personal identity—especially with regard to race and, to a lesser extent, gender. The episode underscores both the limits and potential of changing reading habits, the power of availability and algorithmic recommendation, and the challenging work ahead for publishers, marketers, and readers who care about representation.

Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their own motivations for book selection and to consider how broadening their reading can impact their perspective—while also pushing for systemic changes in the industry.

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Additional Resources

Laura McGrath’s upcoming book, Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, will explore how agents shape the American literary canon. She also writes the Textbook Crunch Substack for those interested in data-driven book industry insights.

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For more episodes and full show notes, visit bookriot.com.

Transcript

[Laura McGrath]

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[Jeff O.]

Tech moves fast, so keep pace with the Daily Crunch podcast from TechCrunch. With new episodes every day, this podcast will give you a quick overview on everything you need and should know about startups, new tech regulations, and more. Listen to TechCrunch Daily Crunch now. Wherever you get your podcasts, that's TechCrunch Daily Crunch. Wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'.

[Sean Pyles]

Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[Jeff O.]

We've got someone with us today. Rebecca, who do we have today?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We have Laura McGrath, our favorite English professor, literary historian and data scientist. She's back. She has a new article about, I don't know, readerly habits and research to share with us. Y' all have told us that you have loved the past episodes where Laura has come on. She has all kinds of data. It's true, Laura. All kinds of interesting data about how readers think about things, what reading habits actually look like. We did a really interesting episode back in the fall about what it means to be an omnivorous reader and whether most people are omnivorous or stick to particular genres. You can go back and find that. So we've made her our data correspondent. She's going to be here with us several times this year. Laura, thanks for coming back.

[Laura McGrath]

Thank you so much for having me. It fills my heart, heart with joy to know that people find this enjoyable to listen to and that they're, I don't know, happy to be wonky with me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, we've built a nerdy corner of the podcasting world here. You're right at home.

[Laura McGrath]

Nerdy corners are the best corners.

[Jeff O.]

I think you have an article that you're, you're sort of building this off of that asks people some questions. Why don't you tell us about what's about to happen to, for and with us over the next 45 minutes?

[Laura McGrath]

Sure, sure. So kind of unplanned. This article is, is in many ways a nice companion piece to the episode that we ran way back when on reader omnivorousness. And it's about the ways that we choose and select what to read, not about how we explode. Categories. I want to be super clear that this is not an article that I wrote, but this is really, really excellent research by Professor Millicent Weber at Australian National University and Rachel Norda at Portland State University. So your neighbor Jeff Weber and Norda have written this fantastic article in the journal Poetics about the concept that they are calling reader character identity interdependence, which is a really fascinating concept, if perhaps a rather wonky academic way of saying how we choose books, about whom and what it is that draws us to select books. So I'm really excited to chat about that today. What I love about this article, among many things that I love about this, is they conducted a huge survey of 3,000 readers from the United States, the UK and Australia, so hitting our major anglophone markets, all about how we choose what we read. So I wanted to start today by trying out my version of this survey on YouTube. Great. I should say Norda and Weber did not publish their survey protocol, so this is just my assumptions of their questions,

[Jeff O.]

reverse engineering their methodology. Okay, that's good. I like that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We love that. We will. I'll get a link from you, Laura, to the article. So we'll put that in the show notes for people who want to hunt it up.

[Laura McGrath]

Great. Great. So if anyone has any problems with these questions or the way they are worded, all of the blame is on me on this part, not not on. On Millicent and Rachel, who've done much better.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Don't send her emails. She's doing her best.

[Sean Pyles]

Want to learn how you can make smarter decisions with your money? Well, I've got the podcast for you. I'm Sean Pyles and I host NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. On our show, we help listeners like you make the most of your finances. I sit down with NerdWallet's team of nerds, personal finance experts in credit cards, banking, investing and more. We answer your real world money questions and break down the latest personal finance news. The nerds will give you the clarity you need by cutting through the clutter and misinformation. In today's world of personal finance, we don't promote get rich quick schemes or hype unrealistic side hustles. Instead, we offer practical knowledge that you can apply in your everyday life. You'll learn about strategies to help you build your wealth, invest wisely, shop for financial products and plan for major life events and you'll walk away with the confidence you need to ensure that your money is always working as hard as you are. So turn to the nerds to answer your real world money questions and get insights that can help you make the smartest financial decisions for your life. Listen to nerdwallets smart money podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.

[Laura McGrath]

Yes. Okay, so I thought we would dive in and I'm so excited to put you on the spot because, well, I'm just very excited about this. Okay, so tell me, what was the last book you read?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I just read Kin by Tayari Jones.

[Jeff O.]

I just read Light in Thread by Hong Kong.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, okay. Looking forward to that conversation later.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, this is a preview of frontless foyer, I guess, Laura, that we're going to do.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, I will put myself on the spot as well. I'm so excited that you both said the things that you both said. This will make for a great conversation. I have not finished. I am in the middle of reading belatedly. The Ten Year Affair by Erin Summers. That is what I'm here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A house favorite.

[Laura McGrath]

Yes, yes, it is a house favorite that I know. Okay, so what are the settings of the two books? The geographic settings of the books you're reading?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Ken is set in Louisiana in the Jim Crow South, I assume South Korea.

[Jeff O.]

It's nonfiction. I'm not really sure, but I'm just making some inferences about. It's nonfiction. She doesn't say. Or she does say place names, but I don't know what they are. So I'm just making some assumptions there.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, Jeff, I might need you to pick something new. We might need to stick with novels here. That was my.

[Jeff O.]

Oh, novels.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Jeff O.]

Oh, okay. What's the last novel that I read? I guess it was the Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, and where is this one set?

[Jeff O.]

That is set in and around, I think, Baltimore, Maryland.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, cool.

[Jeff O.]

I should know. Somewhere in there. Middle Atlantic Seaboard.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, I think that they specify novels, but I think for. I'm going to assume they're specifying novels, so I'll ask you that too. My apologies. And the Ten Year Affair is set in upstate New York. Okay, what about the race, gender and sexuality of the main character of this book?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There are two main characters of Kin. They are both black women and one is straight. One is queer, but straight presenting because of the timeline.

[Jeff O.]

The protagonist of the Correspondent is a retired cishet white woman.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, straight. And the Ten Year affair is Cishet straight white woman. Where did I. Okay, and how about secondary characters Same question. Race, gender, sexuality of the. This will be tough actually for the Correspondent, but the. The main secondary character, sure, most of

[Rebecca Schinsky]

the main characters and secondary characters in Kin are black. Almost all of them are presented also as straight.

[Jeff O.]

To my first approximation, I think all. I think. I can't think. I put this way, I cannot think of anyone in the Correspondent that I don't immediately know isn't white.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay.

[Jeff O.]

I. That's. I don't know. There could be a secondary character I missed a clue or something else going on in that.

[Laura McGrath]

But likewise for the Ten Year Affair, though I should say that I have not finished it. So I don't know.

[Jeff O.]

I think I can tell you, Laura, that I don't think you're gonna. There's gonna change. The demo's not gonna change much as you get towards the end.

[Laura McGrath]

No, that'd be. That'd be a surprise to me based on where I'm at now. Okay, so open ended. A little bit more open ended. Why did you select this book? What was it that drew you to this book?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I love Tayari Jones's past work. This one is coming up next week. Actually, by the time this episode is released, the book will have come out yesterday. And so it's been on my radar for a while and I was coming off of some other nonfiction and wanted to pick up a novel, so this was just the next thing for me. Is that too logistical?

[Laura McGrath]

Like. No, not at all.

[Jeff O.]

For me, this is one that I knew did very well as a debut novel among indie readers. Heard it talked about a lot and I wanted to see what the deal was because we don't see debut litfic like this get picked up. So I was like, okay, let's check this out.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. And I mean, gosh, that's a different conversation to have. But what an interesting story around that book.

[Jeff O.]

Yes.

[Laura McGrath]

And I picked the 10 year affair for a lot of reasons. One, it came very highly recommended from people who said tastes I trust, including you. Two, I am familiar with Aaron Summers, just as a bookish person on the Internet. And also this book is. I was excited about the form of the book, the kind of sliding doors to two timelines. But also this book is just unfortunately or for better or for worse, I'm not sure, a little close to home for me.

[Jeff O.]

Only need look at her eyewear for all of us to feel very seen by this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Just a Warby Parker ad happening here.

[Laura McGrath]

I know it's super close for me that this is, you know, a newborn and a three year old that this main character. I've had a two year old and a six year old, so this is like actually just, you know, a year and a half removed for me. Which is, I mean none of the rest of it. Just at least the.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Just early middle aged white people.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Having.

[Jeff O.]

You know, I should have said about the Correspondent too, Laura. I didn't think about it, but I was interested in the form. So it's an epistolary novel.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Jeff O.]

And when I picked it up and I flipped through it, I was like, this is interesting. So I'll add that to my stew of reasons for picking it up too. Now that you said something about form.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, okay.

[Jeff O.]

Definitely mattered for me.

[Laura McGrath]

No, for sure, for sure it does. I think what we will run up against with any of these sorts of any sort of research that's about your average reader is that neither of us, none of us are your average reader.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Weirdos.

[Laura McGrath]

So I think that that's there. But all of this is, I think really important information. And they ask lots of questions of readers about what in a very open ended, content neutral way impact their, impacted their experience of reading the book. And they include several prompts like, you know, had you heard the author speak? Did you know something about this author's background? You know, so all of these things are really important, important contexts for why we happen to pick these books. Okay, so would you say, again, this is so weird. I think this question is not applicable to the two of you. Would you say that these books are fairly representative of the sorts of things that you like, read?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh yes. Kin definitely is for me.

[Jeff O.]

Interesting question. Maybe sort of. If the book had not had. If I wasn't interested in reading what was popular or like trending for its own sake, just sort of like for professional interest? I don't know that I would have picked it up, but I liked it and I've recommended it, so I guess I should say yes. That's a long way of getting coming to grips with. I'm the kind of person that liked this book and being okay with that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Things people like are good actually. Jeff.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, well, I've got some quibbles with the book and discourse around it, but that's another conversation.

[Laura McGrath]

It is, it is. Okay, so we've got our specific questions. These are larger questions about your reading habits that may or may not ask you to think more about Kin or about the Correspondent. So do you tend, do you think, if you're being honest, you tend to read books so with characters whose lives or identities resemble your own

[Rebecca Schinsky]

intentionally? No. I mean, sometimes, but part of Book Riot's mission and something that's baked into the way that I read now, and actually part of what's been always been baked into what reading does for me is other ways of viewing the world and other, like, engaging with other modes of experience. So. No,

[Jeff O.]

I would say the same answer, basically, almost word for word or spirit for spirit, if not letter for letter.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm glad that I picked the book that I picked for this conversation. I mean, it's what's currently on my nightstand, so this works really well. I think I agree with both of you spiritually, in terms of what I would say about my reading habits. And yet the book that is currently on my nightstand looks like someone who could be me very, very easily without much imagination.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean. Yeah. And if we had recorded this a week earlier, I would be talking about one of Ali Hazelwood's women in stem romances, which is also not my life, but it's closer to my life. So there. There are different moments where the answer is closer to yes. Certainly.

[Jeff O.]

I do wonder, too, Laura. I mean, that my nonfiction got disqualified, I think is interesting because I do. My nonfiction reading is very much other live stuff, especially memoirs. Like, I'm very much looking for someone who's not like me, something I know nothing about, a profession, point of view. My fiction reading may be less intentionally. I don't know, different. I don't know. I. I don't really break it down that way. I don't know if Rebecca wants to say about her, but I do look at my reading over the course of a year. Quarter.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O.]

Otherwise. To see kind of how I'm doing. So that's something that probably most readers don't. Is like, have I only read white people this month? Like, what am I looking at? And I think that's. Having looked at bestseller lists, like, ever in my life. That's extremely unusual for most readers.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll get into the study here in a sec. But Webber and Norda are really interested in characters, and so I disqualified nonfiction because we're not thinking about character in quite the same way. Of course we are, in terms of figures that are part of a narrative and are making choices and moving. But I think it's probably best to stay in the world of fictional characters. But this is. I will write to them after we're done and ask if this was actually something that they controlled for or not and how they would. How they would think about nonfiction in the context.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, totally fair. We Just came off of reading the Warmth of Other Suns, which is about as close to like real character narratives as you can.

[Jeff O.]

Narrative nonfiction.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, and I mean like a perfect work of narrative nonfiction.

[Jeff O.]

Yes, perfect, perfect.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay. So you do not necessarily tend to read books with other characters whose lives and identities resemble yours. You value more expansive experience, reading diversely, experiencing other worlds, experiencing other contexts. Do you think, how far away would you say you are here from the average reader? Do you think that the average reader tends to read books with characters whose lives or identities resemble their own?

[Jeff O.]

Well, absolutely, yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, given the bestseller list.

[Jeff O.]

Absolutely. I don't think people think about it at all. To a first approximation, no one thinks about this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, but that's complicated by the data about like upper middle class black women buying and reading more books demographically than other groups. And I mean we, we don't have data that gets that. I don't have access to data that gets specific enough to know are they also reading the most the bestsellers written mostly by white people or are they seeking out stories by people whose experiences resemble theirs? But like, if the average reader is a middle aged white book club lady, that certainly reflects the bestseller list.

[Jeff O.]

Well, I'd be curious to see and maybe they have an answer about this. Laura, maybe we're going to get this in the results here, but like, if you are not represented by the mainstream publishing industry, do you tend to write read into your identity or more away from your identity? I would guess you'd sort of read more into your identity. Whereas as a white cish dude, I don't have to do anything to read into my identity except go to the bookstore and sort of pick what's available. Like let myself be buffeted by the winds of marketing and publicity and it's going to blow me towards my own shores.

[Laura McGrath]

I thought the white literary men have died though, Jeff. I thought they've all.

[Jeff O.]

Listen, Laura, we get together on Thursday nights. It's a small group. We don't have to have the call ahead for more than 10 reservations.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You can find [e-mail] performative reading PDX.

[Laura McGrath]

Everyone brings their bandana. It's all cute. Yeah, no, I think those are really good. I think that's a really good question. Especially like reading into your identity or reading away from it and the barriers that are presented that would allow you to do such a thing. Right. The barriers that are in place that make it possible for someone to say these are the sorts of books that I select intentionally or the sorts of the books that just come to me. So we've kind of talked through several of these other questions, so I won't necessarily ask them, but what Weber and Norda are really trying to get at in this concept is, is how reader identity relates to character identity and this question of who reads what and why. There's a lot of pressure that we can and should put on these questions that we can, I think, just through our conversation, but they're beginning from this premise and you've cited some of the data. Rebecca. We've obviously been talking around these stereotypes. The idea that men are only reading books by and about men, that women are reading books by and about women, and that there are, but that they are more open than men are, and that there are lots of different conditions of identity that are constraining what we're choosing and how and why. So, you know, we know and understand that the publishing industry in the United States is largely staffed by white people and the sort of modal or average reader is a middle aged white woman. But we don't know a whole lot or we make a whole lot of assumptions about what that woman's taste is, about what she will and will not read, about what she does and does not like to read, and in particular, how her identity does or does not constrain her reading choices. So what Norda and Weber are really interested in is this question of how identity guides our choices, if it guides our choices in the first place, how it does, but then also trying to really complicate these questions of what identity means. Identity, as we know, is not a singular thing. It's not restricted only by our race or only by our gender, or only by our physical ability. But in fact, all of these sorts of different categories overlap. Marginalized and minoritized identities in particular intersect in ways that compound. And here we can shout out and thank Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw, of course, for introducing the concept of intersectionality for us. So to talk about what women read or what men read, or what boys read or what girls read, if we're in the children's YA space, is to really miss out on really complex ideas about identity and readership. And so this is kind of a first order question before we even get to the question of omnivorousness. In many ways, right before we can talk about the sorts of books that you're interested in reading, how does your identity shape what you might choose in the first place?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Really interesting. Are you asking us?

[Laura McGrath]

No, no, I'm not. Sorry, I got a. I got a sad little like my computer's kind of freaking out. I'm not asking. Oh, I got a Python notification that was happening here and it just like, really?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I was like, I don't know how to answer this question.

[Jeff O.]

I was like, geez, let us hang there, Laura. Good lord.

[Laura McGrath]

Oh, you said to pause for the ad breaks. I was just.

[Jeff O.]

Oh yeah, no, that's, that's, that's. No, no, it just punctuated by like the, the meta. Meta podcasting stuff there at this. Well, I, I guess one thing that just occurred to me in that pause while I was trying to think of something smart to say back to you, Laura. I wonder about an interesting, I don't know, chasm in readers is people who think about their reading at all. They think about the reading choices at all in a meta way versus just picking up book. Because I think that might be a bigger divide than any. Well, that may be an interesting divide, right. That Rebecca and I are on one side of that and maybe you are too. I don't want to speak for your own reading choices and a lot of the readers on the show, but we hear so much, so many times over the years, we get a comment like, I just want to read good stories. Sort of an anti diluvian sort of. I wish I could go back to when people didn't think about any of this stuff. And in my own life, I don't know, even amongst the. I would say active readers that I know, they are trying to find something that gets them to read first. And if they do any more thinking beyond that, I don't know that there's much there. Rebecca, I don't know. Is that unfair of our experience of doing the show?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, if we know that, which we do that like a heavy reader in America by favor data to cite, reads 10 to 12 books a year, I would suspect that most of those people even in that category are picking up like they're browsing at their local bookstore or that Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table, flipping through stuff and going with what catches their attention without much consideration of, you know, the author's identity or the character's identities. But that might be. I guess what I'm trying to say is I think a lot of this is subconscious, if it's happening at all.

[Jeff O.]

Well, I guess that's what I'm saying, that subconscious versus I don't know what the wrong Freudian thing is. But like, yeah, on purpose.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm curious and I don't know, Laura, if this is in the article, but I'm curious if the researchers asked, just asked people how they pick books or did they ask, like, what is your demographic information and what are the last five books you read? Because that would be more like I could pull up my reading spreadsheet and we could see if the books that I'm reading actually are different from my life or if I just want to think of myself as a person who does that.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. And, you know, I think that there are limits to what identity can tell us here. Right. I don't know that character demographic is ever going to be a reason why I select books. It certainly might have something to do with what I am aware of. Right. What is available and what kind of breaks into my consciousness as a book that I want to be spending my precious time on when I also am reading the things that I'm teaching. I am also still a historian and still reading books that have not been published in the past year. You know, so there's that. I also think another kind of confounding point here that, that Rachel Norda, or, sorry, Rachel Nordette and Millie Weber are not necessarily getting at is the way in which character demographic is also constrained by, or conditioned by genre. Right. So I, I did not choose to read the 10 Year Affair because it is about a 30 something young mom, white lady wearing her Warby Parker glasses in a new house that's like too expensive and kind of falling down. Like, that is my life. Yeah. But like, that is not what I chose to read. But, you know, if you were going to tell me a comedy of manners about a young mom and an alternate reality in which she engages in an affair that's about like the sort of elder millennial, you know, social class situation. Like how much of that, how is that not screaming white lady to you? Right. Like so many of these things that are also about genre and form and story are also matters of race, of social class, of gender that have a lot to do with the sorts of stories that are allowed to be told and the sorts of stories that have to do with the sort of access further up the pipeline. Right. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I hope that Kiley Reid is sitting somewhere working on her version of the Ten Year Affair, because the white ladies shouldn't have all the claims to the messy elder Millennial.

[Laura McGrath]

I would love to read Kylie Reid version of All Fours. That would be amazing. Okay, so let's get into the data. It is because I think this is useful. It is perhaps not terribly surprising, but I think that it is so extraordinarily useful. I mean, this is like the banner that I will fly forever. It is so extraordinarily useful to actually have receipts that we can have. When we talk about these sorts of assumptions, particularly around demography and particularly around identity and taste, because this is a whole mishmash of vibes. And it becomes really useful, I think, to actually get some purchase on what's. What's going on. So in this survey of 3,000 readers from the US, Australia and the UK, they asked readers similar questions to what I just asked you. So it began with what was the last book that you read? So that's a really important distinction I want to make. This is not about what is available in the market. This is not about what's getting published in any given year. This is about the last book that someone read and someone chose. Why it's super useful. Right. That the ten Year Affair happens to be on my bookshelf, or why it's super useful that you picked Kin by Tayari Jones. These are just the things that are coming to us rather than, you know, how representative those books are of any particular industry choices. They asked information about the title, the author, the character demographics, the author demographics about the book, setting and use of language. I mean, I think based on our conversation already up front, you can tell that this conversation is going to be about identity. But, you know, your book is set in the South, Rebecca, Your book is set in Baltimore. Jeff. My book is set in upstate New York. You know, I guess Baltimore is probably the furthest from where you live. You're not terribly far from Louisiana, Rebecca. I'm not terribly far from upstate New York. So like, Jeff, you're the only one that's really reading outside of your region here, I suppose. Good for you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, a gold star for you.

[Laura McGrath]

But anyway, that's there too. That wasn't of super interest to them as things progressed. But it might matter. If you were talking about Nation, for instance, think about the uptake of something like A Guardian and a Thief in the United States.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Or if Jeff had been reading Hong Kong's fiction instead of non fiction and we were talking about South Korea.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. They asked about publisher info which I cannot imagine had any sort of information, any sort of relevance for. For the average reader.

[Jeff O.]

Yes, it was published. Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If they could get like one person out of 3,000 civilians who was like, here's the imprint that published my book.

[Laura McGrath]

No, I sidebar. I have the world's most perfect and on the nose Halloween costume. And like, no one else would ever think it's me. I want to be Leslie Knopf.

[Jeff O.]

What is it?

[Laura McGrath]

Laura wouldn't that be just the funniest thing. What does I have not gone any further than that.

[Jeff O.]

Is that a Parks and Recnoff mashup? Laura? Is that what you're doing right there? Amazing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Never change. Laura McGregor.

[Laura McGrath]

Stupidest typo I made. One time while I was typing, I thought, oh, I wrote something about Blanche or Blanche Knope. It was like, wait a minute. Hold on.

[Jeff O.]

Blanche. Nope.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Would it be great, Leslie? Could something perfect. It would just be like, it would be great.

[Laura McGrath]

Leslie Knope looking very bookish.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It needs to be one of those parties where you can just put on a name tag and help people out. You know, Leslie Canop.

[Laura McGrath]

But I think you two might be the only people that would laugh at that. Like, I would go to that party and people would be like, wait, there

[Rebecca Schinsky]

are some nerds listening to this show that they might not know that are appreciating this.

[Laura McGrath]

I don't know.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, you. That's a Venn diagram of diminishing Venn

[Laura McGrath]

diagram that has meat in the very middle.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's like, we're just like sardined in there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is one of the ways the Internet is still magic that the three people who appreciate this joke have found each other. Thank you for hearing that.

[Laura McGrath]

I've been. I've been really waiting for people to think that's funny. It's good stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's really good stuff.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, so let's recap. Okay. Publisher info that was not of relevance to their results. And then they asked other information that would contextualize. So in what format did you read? Were you listening to the audiobook? Did you hear the author speak somewhere? Had you seen an adaptation of this book? So did you go read Wuthering Heights because you watched the adaptation for Incident? Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Boy, are you in for a surprise.

[Laura McGrath]

So, yeah, it was asking a lot of those questions as well. And then they also asked everyone a really open ended question, which is, which features were important to your experience of reading the book and why? So not about why they selected. They actually are not asking any questions about why or how readers selected this book. They want to ask questions about what they are reading. The selection is the part that I'm really fascinated by. But they're asking, really, you know, what have you read what features?

[Jeff O.]

Laura? I don't even know if I would know how to read it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Is that, like, it's short?

[Jeff O.]

It was cheap. It was available to buy. It was. No, I'm serious. Like, it was. It was. It came up on my Libby hold, my mom Gave it to me. I found it somewhere like that because

[Laura McGrath]

it's so open ended. It seems like from the results that they end up quoting. People took this as an opportunity to say basically what you just said earlier, Jeff, which is, I wanted to read about a good story. I wanted to read a good story. These questions of identity didn't matter to me. Several people responded and said, you know, this main character's experiences seemed a lot like mine and that was really relevant. I wanted to learn something new. The readers were kind of cued to the sorts of questions that the researchers were asking around identity and relationship. And so at least the relevant quotations for this article are quotes that are talking about those features of the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So it would be for kin. My assumption is that Oprah's gonna pick kin. We might know that by the time this episode airs. So a future version of me might be like. Because I saw that Oprah picked it as a book club book and I had a copy already and I know that Tayari Jones can tell a story and write a sentence, that kind of stuff.

[Laura McGrath]

Or you know, I asked you why you picked this book, which was perhaps unfair, but even the way that we answered about. About what we chose. Right. So, Jeff, your experience of reading the Correspondent may be impacted by the fact that it's an epistolary novel. The. The fact that this novel received so much buzz that it was this kind of surprise runaway bestseller that really impacted your experience of reading this novel.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, I mean if you think about the negative case of something that could have fit a lot of the other things I said about the Correspondent, but I didn't pick up, say alchemized. Right. Similar kind of story, huge hit, a little unusual. I picked that up like not for me. So I think there's a lot going on in that not for meness that people are, including myself, are using or the. This sounds like something that I'm gonna like. There's a lot of un. Articulated assumptions, bias, predilection stuff going on. Yeah, that's. He's like for me versus this is

[Laura McGrath]

an open ended question in the most open ended of way, which is the great kind of open ended question.

[Jeff O.]

Like your therapist just sitting there waiting for you to say something.

[Laura McGrath]

This is the same word about that. So their participants were 35% of them identified as black or indigenous people of color, 67% identified as women or gender non conforming, 14% identified as LGBTQIA and about 42% identified as having a disability or chronic illness and no age. Everyone's 18 up to participate in the study and they're evenly split through the three nationalities. So about a thousand participants from each country. And again those are the uk, the United States and Australia. So based on what these readers reported, this is just these. There's two types of results here that I'm going to talk about. The one is just about the characters of the books that people selected to read. We don't know why they selected it, but just based on the books on their nightstand or recently put back on their shelf, what do the characters look like? What is just this random sampling? Semi random sampling. They found that only 47% of the main characters of the books because remember they asked about main and secondary characters. Only 47% of the main characters were women, non binary or gender non conforming. So somewhat evenly split, but more male characters or.

[Jeff O.]

Or for those casts. So they have to be one of.

[Laura McGrath]

Just one of those.

[Jeff O.]

Just one of those three novels.

[Laura McGrath]

So women or gender non conforming. So most of the books were men.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, most of them were men.

[Laura McGrath]

Even though 67% of the participants are women or gender non conforming.

[Jeff O.]

Right.

[Laura McGrath]

So we see an overrepresentation of male main characters relative to the readers who were asked while 30 0.

[Jeff O.]

Surprise. Rebecca, on a scale of 1 to 10. Or we're 0.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm saving my soapbox for later.

[Laura McGrath]

I will register some surprise on this. On this result. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Mostly because of the sad literary men discourse. Right. The idea that like. But whatever.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The Internet is not real life, but whatever.

[Laura McGrath]

We don't have to talk about that right now. So the other results. I'll leave my sad Internet men.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, yeah, let's just stay here for six hours.

[Laura McGrath]

I'm keed in. Okay. So while 35% of the participants identified as BIPOC, only 23% of the main characters were. So out of this 3,000 readers, only 23% of main characters were black or indigenous people of color. Black, indigenous or people of color. Okay.

[Jeff O.]

Might have expected lower, to be honest with you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Given stats out of the industry and

[Laura McGrath]

that's still just main characters. And then only 10% of the main characters of the books that have been selected were disabled or chronically ill, which that actually is something that visibly.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So that actually seems high to me against base rates in fiction.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. I don't know. Actually a ton of. I don't have a ton of information or a ton of statistics about disability and that's something. Actually, can I say this? If you would like to write in, I would love to know more if you have any research or have seen any sort of report around representation of disability in literature, I would love to know more quantitatively. And that's just kind of outside of my experience right now. Okay. But then, interestingly, what did align pretty consistently with the percentage of participants, and the percentage of main characters was LGBTQ and IA main characters. That there was about 14% of participants identified as LGBTQ. And that was the same with main characters of books. Yeah. Okay, so that's about our main characters. Where there is, however, much more diversity is in secondary characters. So, yes, I totally agree with that. So there might be more main characters, main characters who are white, but they may have a, you know, magical black auntie or a sassy black best friend that's reinforcing these stereotypes around the kind of central white protagonist. So they're not necessarily just books that are buying about exclusively white people, but we see more diversity amongst secondary characters. So you can hear. I mean.

[Jeff O.]

Well, can I pause there just for a second? I mean, some of that might just be numbers. There are more secondary characters than protagonists in a given book. So you can have six or seven secondary characters that's available for someone to think of. So we're still really not sure, like, representation across available characters at the same time. So, anyway, I just thought I would. There's not one main. They're not about Batman and Robin. There's Robin and the Joker and everybody else in the full retina.

[Laura McGrath]

The ensemble cast.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The ensemble, exactly.

[Laura McGrath]

And I mean, you can hear from my editorializing and the way that I described these characters, sheer representation is not a nethood. Right. Like, the fact that someone exists who is a person of color does not mean that they are represented in a way that is. That is reflective of anything positive or is not just like reinforcing negative racial stereotypes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, Needs to be good representation, well done, responsible, all those things.

[Jeff O.]

Or even sophisticated or just name checked or sort of throw away.

[Laura McGrath]

I mean, the help fits this category. Right. Of a white main character that you might need, and also a very large cast of black characters, almost none of which are represented in ways that are even slightly begin to acknowledge their full humanity. Okay, I'm finding my way in my notes here. Okay. Yeah. So, and interestingly, the representation of people of color amongst the secondary characters was greater than that of the participants. So almost all of the participants were reporting some level of secondary characters that were not white. And for all of the reasons that you mentioned, Jeff. So on the one hand, this is really promising, but on the other hand, it's Hard to read much into this because we don't really know much about the quality. The sheer number doesn't do much for us. So the important caveat, this is not asking questions about what is available. This is a different measure than what is published in any given year. It's about what people are reading. And where this is survey stops. And where I would like to continue it or where I would like someone else to continue it is to ask, like, what. What actually made you choose this book? Right. What governed your. Your principle of selection? How does genre interface with. With these particular issues? And. And there's, you know, a million different ways to talk about that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's super interesting. And it feels like this dovetails with, I mean, our ongoing conversation about all of the vectors that will go into addressing the diversity problems in publishing, that it's not just the hiring pipeline and it's not just the editorial pipeline to make sure that books by minoritized and marginalized people are being published, but that there is a point at which it's readers responsibility to pay attention to those things. And, you know, not just because we need to develop market forces that reinforce the industry for producing those kinds of books, but also that if you don't pay attention to it, like our working assumption is that if you pay attention to it, most people will default by virtue of what is largely available to reading books by and about white people. And that it requires, you know, active, deliberate attention to do otherwise with your reading life.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. I think this is getting at the interplay too with personal choice and availability. Right. Is this a matter of preference for like, I am actively choosing books this way or I am open to. And that has everything to do with what comes into my sphere of attention. Right. So this also speaks to the question of the pipeline that you're talking about, Rebecca, which is like, how are books being marketed? What is the sort of money, what is the sort of energy that is going to raising awareness and raising attention about any book that you may or may not come across as a matter of course, you know, and the importance, I think, of mediation of mediators and critics of thinking about how to direct attention. Right. It really demonstrates, I think, the power of directing attention toward different books.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I mean, I think about this all the time. And Jeff, I think you do too. When you're like in Target or Costco or airport bookstores, like the places that really casual readers bump into books and have to make a decision about what to read next, where availability really constrains, really matters.

[Jeff O.]

I was in Costco the other day. And like, they've shrunk the books down and I didn't do. I didn't need to do a spreadsheet, Laura, to tell you that the demo was a little tough when it came to people of color, like 0 for 50 or something.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, there's a huge, huge. Last time I was in my airport a couple of weeks ago, there was a big, like, standee at the entrance to the Hudson News, and It was like 25 different Frida McFadden paperbacks. And like, okay, good for freedom. McFadden and her publisher, I'm sure, paid for that feature, but that's 25 slots that are all going to books by one single white author who also has a lot of exposure. And I'm sure that it's an effective sales technique. But I couldn't help but wonder, like, what if those were 25 contemporary novels by a bunch of different kinds of authors and you had Frieda McFadden and you had Angela Flournoy and you threw Jasmine Guillory up there and what about Abby Jimenez and. And then readers would get more choice. But that availability in those really casual places, a huge impact.

[Jeff O.]

Probably. One reason Laura, and I'll say Rebecca and I too, are so interested in what got people to buy something is that it's not. It often is the case that it's maybe just what's there. But the reason there's 25 free to McFadden things is because the person who's going through Target has probably heard about it in some way. Right? They have something floating around in their mind that's ready to attach it to their next book purchase. And there it is. I've heard about what's the deal with this? I saw. Or my mom was reading this, or I saw it on the plane. And like, they have sort of ambient awareness of some books. And then what book is available for them at the moment they're ready to buy it for whatever reason, impulse buyer, whatever. That's kind of the. That's how you get a giant hit, right? Is like it's a. Those things then start to feed on themselves over and over again. Because Rebecca and I were doing the Joy Luck Club episode about Amy Tan. Right. Interesting book. A lot of different kinds of representations there. But it start. It gets to a point, all of these things become a phenomenon and they feed against each other. Right. And there's so much friction for marginalized, minoritized people to get into that flywheel of momentum. And I don't know how. I mean, and We've talked about a lot about how we don't know how that that can change. Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And once you're on it, it's hard to get off.

[Jeff O.]

Hard to get off, Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I made a shtick several years ago of sending Jeff a photo. Anytime I'm traveling and someone is reading the seven whatevers of Evelyn Hugo and I'm still sending them to him. Every time I'm in the airport, there's somebody like, here it is in another seat, back pocket. That flywheel is so persuasive and really persistent.

[Jeff O.]

I guess I have this other thought. Lauren, I'm curious what you think about this of, like, Rebecca and I talk about this, too, about our own reading lives, of what we'd like to see in the bestsellers, like, what we'd feel like there's been progress made that, like, bestsellers, award winners sort of generally represent. We'll use the US For a moment. The demographics of the US As a whole. That's like. That seems like a reasonable kind of endpoint, how you get from there. On the other hand, I think it is reasonable for people of all kinds to be mostly interested in stories about things that seem relatable to them in some way.

[Sean Pyles]

How.

[Jeff O.]

How we connect those two things, I think is the art of the matter. Right. Like, it makes sense that I'm going to read about my life and things that I'm aware of and questions that I have or problems that I have, life experiences that I have that I'm interested in other representations of. But how do I then not make that the boundary fence to my yard, right. Where I can hop over that and explore and be interested in other people, too at the same time. And I find that friction and that tension hard to reconcile in a lot of ways.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. And I think there's, you know, we talked. There's another set of results here that we can chat about in a sec. But, you know, the question of, you know, I just want to read a good story. It was something that you raised earlier, Jeff, and that was something that a lot of the respondents here in their survey wrote about. You know, I think our idea of what a good story is is likewise culturally conditioned, is likewise conditioned by race, gender, sexuality. That this question of why we come to books in any given way, it's entirely impossible, I think, to separate them from our own subject positions. And so learning about something different, learning about someone or an experience or a place or a culture that's different, is one reason why we might come to books that might be rooted in our own subject positions and identities. But even, even the. I don't want to do that. The I want to, you know, cetera is paramus. I'm setting all of that aside. I just want a story that's good. Even that is coming from that. That same vantage point and that same background, or at least one that's been equally shaped by our own backgrounds, if not the exact same way.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I think, you know, largely unconscious, as we were saying. But since you referenced the Help, I think that's a perfect example that they're like, that book flew off shelves. I was a bookseller when it was out and it was mostly middle aged white ladies going to their book clubs reading this book that they thought was just this wonderful story and not subjecting it to deeper analysis about are the black people in the story presented as anywhere close to being full, fully human and complicated in all the ways that humans should be? And I'm sure that many of them after the fact would have said, like, I didn't think about it and it was still a good story,

[Laura McGrath]

or this did not disrupt my sense of my own centrality in the world that that whiteness remains normalized and naturalized from which kind of everything else moves or deviates. Right. Yeah. I mean, these other results are cool, but like we're just on this point that I think is really important. I mean, I think this also gets at this question of, you know, why should we read books about people who look different than we do? Should we do that? Is that something that is good? I mean, I think this gets at our question of what we expect reading to do for us and what we expect reading to do for the world. Right. Like why it should be important or meaningful that we actively seek out books or that we don't, but that just as a matter of course, we might come across books that do not center whiteness in some ways. And I think that's a question that we have to constantly be asking and answering again and again and again. I've been really. I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm teaching a young adult class this semester. I've been really influenced by this scholar, former president of the mla, Chris Neufeld. And he doesn't talk about ya, and he's not really talking about book banning or anything of the sort, but he's made the point. And I can send you the link to this podcast which he was talking about it, but he made the point, you know, in many cases, you know, I think that. And he thinks I agree in many Cases conservatives or people who are particularly invested in book banning or challenging, let's say they're telling a much more powerful story about what literature can do than a lot of humanities professors.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, we say this all the time, right?

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, down. And I say, well, listen, I know a whole lot of well read assholes. Like, reading doesn't make you more empathetic. Reading doesn't make you like more people in the world. Like, what am I? I'm doing nothing other than selling literature short and selling its capacity to change us and to expand our world. World so short.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Meanwhile, they think it can turn you gay and I don't know, make you a murderer.

[Laura McGrath]

Perhaps that's a really good thing. Maybe not the murderer part, but like if your reading of a novel can fundamentally change your sense of self and how you occupy the world like that, that is a novel that has done good. Right. And I think we miss that story. And so I think, you know, as we, I at least feel very convicted as a professor who likes to, you know, teach my students to be very sophisticated, which is also a way of teaching them that books shouldn't make them more empathetic or don't have the capacity to do this. I don't know. I just feel when I think through this research again and again, I have to wonder about the story I'm telling about books and reading.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, I think that's interesting because I don't know that we take it implicitly on the show, Rebecca, that reading is good. I don't think we believe that sort of of itself. Right. Like we think other kinds of artistic experience can do similar kinds of things, but in aggregate it can be an avenue to thinking, feeling, being and knowing ways that aren't just sort of readily available to you or given to you off the shelf and whatever that looks like in your life. Right. That can be a way of breaking outside of. I've talked to too many authors who, going to the library as a kid and having the freedom to pick whatever they want to read was super formative for them. Right. Like that freedom of like being able to have some. Even if it's like a weirdly passive agency where you're just sort of consuming something else someone's written. You do that enough, you get a sense that the world is big and messy and there's a lot of different kinds of people in it and a lot of different ways of being in it. And whether that's good or bad, like you can still know a lot of well read assholes. Are they really well Read. But also, just because that's sort of true on the margin doesn't mean it's. If 10% of the people are well read or assholes, that means 90% aren't. That's the story you need, right? Laura, here's your study.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

How many book people are asking, do

[Jeff O.]

you consider yourself well read? And are you an asshole? And you can just sort of see, you know, does it line up?

[Laura McGrath]

It's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm so delighted that this is the phrase we've landed on because I just guested on the Reading Glasses podcast for an episode that's coming out next week about the idea of being well read. And I said this exact sentence, a lot of well, like being. You can still be well read and be an asshole. I mean, I think the thing we care about on the show or as people and the thing that I will say is I care about like living in a world where people are interested in and curious about the world and interested and curious and other people's experiences and engaged with the world of ideas. I think all kinds of art can do that. And in my experience, books do that in an especially powerful way. If people can achieve that without reading, I'm like, more power to them. That's great. I don't care specifically that people read and certainly you can read without achieving those goals, but I think we, the three of us, share a lived experience that books are a vehicle for that way of engaging with the world.

[Laura McGrath]

Absolutely. I know we are toward the end of our time, but the actual purpose of this article was less about what characters people have chosen to read and more about this question of reader character interdependence, which is about the relationship between readership and identity as it is very multiple and ever evolving. And the readers of books and what they found is that while this is really strong for gender, that women, gender non conforming people, LGBTQ people tend or sorry, not LGBTQ people, people who identify as women and gender non conforming tend to read books about women and other people who are gender non conforming. Likewise with men, although women read more expansively. This is especially strong when it comes to race that what they found in their results.

[Jeff O.]

Wait, say that again. Say that. What's especially strong?

[Laura McGrath]

Selecting books in which the character's identity resembles your own. So it's especially strong with race. So amongst their participants, bipoc readers were really demonstrated a real preference for other books with bipoc characters, but also white characters. Their white readers were selecting almost exclusively white main characters. So it's less about gender being the identity vector that really guides selection and more about race that they found in their results. And importantly, readers who identified with some minoritized or marginalized identity are more likely to read books about characters who are otherwise minoritized or marginalized, whether or not that those things align. But that there's, there was a general openness to reading about difference in, in that regard. So I raised that. It feels like kind of a bummer to end there as we were extolling the virtues of curiosity to end on like. Well, it looks like people aren't actually that curious. But, but I think that it, it emphasizes the importance of production and it does emphasize the importance of representation at that level of production rather than just at the level of reception or, or circulation. Which is to say we need more books by and about black people and people of color. If, if that is in fact the principle of selection for many readers, we need to be servicing those readers in a way that we are not currently doing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, yeah, it's good. And it's good for business, I think.

[Jeff O.]

I think it's necessary, but not sufficient, I guess, to use that language at the same time. Because one thing we've talked about of late, especially in the world of the algorithm, and I was going to ask you about the date of this survey, Laura, about when this actually happened, but the thing that's happening now is that algorithms are especially sensitive to these kinds of selection biases and we'll solve for them over and over and over again and reinforce them. And in that kind of a world, it doesn't matter how many books are out there. Well, it does matter, but it has, there's diminishing returns to how many books are available by non white people in a, let's say in a more. In a majorly white environment, whatever that thing looks like. Right. Because I can tell you this right now, there are way more books by people of color than there were when I was 25 that are just available in the marketplace. And if you told me these numbers you gave me were exactly the same as they were now as in 1995, I would believe you. And I think it's about things. And again, this is something I think, and I talk to people in publishing all the time and they have their own biases like I do, but they kind of want these same things. Right? And there is a marketplace here, it's necessary to have better and more books by people of color in the market. But once it's in the market, one thing I know about publishing, if they could make hits. They would, right? If they could do this, they would do it. So there's some other feature going on and I don't want. The answer is I don't want to let publishing off the hook, but I don't think they're the only thing on the hook is what I'm saying. Like the industry itself is not the only thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's just everybody climb up onto the hook, please.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, right.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. I mean, to, to the date of this, this article was just published this month, so the survey was conducted very recently. I. On this algorithmic question around kind of what. What everyone's being served, that that's making it harder for anyone's attention to expand beyond their own, like deeply ingrained Instagram, you know, demos. I will ask, I will ask Rachel and Millie about that because I, I think that's a really important historical factor that's impacting readership and taste that I don't think we're really accounting for really. Well, Rebecca, you brought up the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as an airport read. I had a student last semester who wrote this brilliant paper about booktok for their senior thesis, and part of the claim that they made was about the role that booktok played with the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in promoting this as a queer novel that was in many ways closeted. Right. That you could buy this book without having any awareness or understanding that you were buying a novel in which the central character's sexuality is the main kind of point of her own internal transformation. Right. Is her coming to sense of her own queerness and figuring out how to make a life for herself within the constraints that she lives in. Right.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. No, no, no.

[Jeff O.]

I guess that's a really.

[Laura McGrath]

It's such an interesting way, I think, to think of how algorithms have created, have limited our choices and yet at the same time also surfaced for us books that might otherwise have.

[Jeff O.]

Well, I think it's my experience of this too, over time and Rebecca, I think you'd agree with me is like, I think people will like all different kinds of books if they actually give them a shot. Right. Like, I think a lot of people, if you told them, say, the synopsis of Heated Rivalry, right, Because that was a hit as a book before. They'd be like, I don't know. But then it becomes a thing that's in the culture. People will give it a shot like the Joy Luck Club or anything else. Or, you know, there's this really funny stand up Bo Johnson who does a thing about fourth wing like, like, I'M just gonna pick this up cause my girlfriend really likes it. And he's like, oh my God. And he's like. But then he keeps reading and he stays up. He would have never picked it up on himself. Right. But there's something about the reading experience. So it's sort of the friction to even turn the first page is really what I think has been the battle

[Rebecca Schinsky]

frontier to that end and the algorithm of it all. There's a lot of incentive to have books that do this kind of, you know, more expansive representation, but that aren't marketed that way. And that's also a disservice to those communities to not market those books that way. If it has to be slipping the pill in with the cheese, we're doing a disservice to a lot of people. And it's interesting. I think that's a fascinating point your student made about Evelyn Hugo's success. We have to wonder, if the book were marketed as being about a woman's journey to understanding herself as queer, would it have been as successful as it had been, Would it have picked up on tickets? Like in my own very anecdotal experience, my mom asks me for book recommendations all the time. You know, 70 year old white lady. Like she's pretty liberal and open minded, but also like kind of set in her ways with books. And I just started slipping her stuff, you know, that didn't look overtly anything to see what would happen. And sure enough, like if it has a good story, it doesn't matter what the, you know, demographic makeup of the characters is, but the getting over the hump of the pitch to that can be something for readers. And I think that's where like intentionality comes into play and also where the industry has to do the really challenging dance of market this in a way that will reach the widest possible consumership or market it in a way that acknowledges the complexities of identity and tries to reach people that have been less represented in fiction.

[Jeff O.]

Yeah, the challenge is to the. The heuristic people are using to evaluate whether or not they're going to a Leica book. Can we decouple? Does the main character kind of look like I do? Can we? Because I don't think that actually is true for most people. I don't know how correlated they would have their experience of similar books that have sort of the same sort of quality rating or story rating or whatever that actually requires them. But I think in their first pass filter, which most people don't know much about, the books that are out there and they're sort of buying it at Target or whatever one of their filters are using to will. I. Like this is how undifferent from me is it? Because that just seems friction to me, liking it, which I think that sells themselves and the books and storyteller short.

[Laura McGrath]

And I do want to just flag for Weber and Norda, the question for them is about congruence and it's about the relationship. What are people doing? This question of selection is my particular bugaboo here. Like, I want to understand what. Yeah, right, right.

[Jeff O.]

No, I agree with you completely.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I agree with you completely.

[Laura McGrath]

Choice. And, and, and that I think is a much bigger, much more, much more nuanced and maybe less empirical question than, than some of this can get up.

[Jeff O.]

Like, how would you even do that, Laura? Like you're a data scientist. Like if, say, say you got the same 3,000 people back on the email, right, and you could ask them one more question that was selection oriented, what would you, would it be? Open ended therapy talk? Like, why did you pick? How did you. How did you pick this book? Or would it be like, here's eight possible things like, was it TikTok? Was it Target? Was your book club? Was it your mom? Was it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know, is Laura about to solve the entire selection problem of publishing?

[Jeff O.]

What would you even ask?

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, no, I think I would be really interested in asking that empirical level first and just get a sense of the one that you just in the ranked choice. Like, where did you learn about this book? Who you know, we know. And there's been so much just recently going around about the. As book world was eliminated, about the work that reviews do and don't actually do, and what sort of weight we place on reviews as campaigns are constructed. And I say this as the person now who is like anxiously waiting for my publicist to get back to me about the review coverage. And so I love you, Alyssa. And so I think, you know, I'd be really curious to know like actually where, where that level of first contact is happening. And then from there I'd be curious to know about, about the. What, what, what drew you or what, what hooked you? What was the pitch?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We will look forward to that episode of the Book Riot podcast.

[Jeff O.]

Speaking of book closing, Laura, tell people about the book. They should be looking forward. It's coming out in April. You can put on hold, I guess, or pre order it or whatever you want to do.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Laura, preorder it.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Jeff O.]

Pre order it.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. The book is called Middleman.

[Jeff O.]

There you go.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So her name is Laura McGrath.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. So the book is called Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. And it is about the role that literary agents have played as the very central and first and I think perhaps most important gatekeeper of the publishing industry since really the 1950s with the advent of the first book auction. And so it looks at the history of agents, how they came to go from being, you know, outsiders and pariahs to the biggest fish in publishing, the New York Times was calling them in 1989, and how the choices that they make, these really small scale choices about any individual client, can give us something down the line downstream, like the canon, and add up to something like questions of race and representation, the rise of the debut novel, the number of New York novels that exist in the world, how American literature is perceived abroad, things like that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That was the sound of all of our dopamine firing.

[Laura McGrath]

Wait, that was more exciting than Leslie Knopf because that was the best I could possibly give to you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That was a hell of a pitch. And listeners. Laura will be back on this show in April. We'll be talking about some things specific to her book and histories of short stories in particular. And she might be making an appearance on Zero to well Read as well. Where can people find you in the meantime after they pre order your book?

[Laura McGrath]

Where can they find you is where. They can also pre order my book. I am.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that's how you hustle.

[Laura McGrath]

I write a substack called Textbook Crunch, which is largely about what we did today. So academic data for people who can use it about, about book publishing and reading. Thank you so much for having me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Always a pleasure.

[Jeff O.]

Let's. Thank you so much, Laura. Just programming notes for other people. This is coming out the next episode. Rebecca's going to be out. Sharifah is going to be joining me next week for a regular news show. I don't know where I'm in space and time, but then we will have Books of March. It. Books of March will be up next after that. Laura, thank you so much. Shoot us an email podcastookriot.com you can find show [e-mail] listen. Thanks to ThriftBooks. We got a little front list for you snuck in there. We'll talk about Light and Thread and Rebecca. I'm sorry, I'm now blank. Oh, the Kin by Terry Jones, as you just mentioned. I think there's a lot to talk about with both of those, I would imagine. Stay tuned. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring the Book Riot podcast. Laura, a pleasure as always.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Thanks Laura.