Building Your Reading Room

An It's Complicated! — Marketing & Sales guest post by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers School & Library Marketing Director, Victoria Stapleton.

---

You have no idea how many, MANY times I have tried to reduce my thoughts on this very large topic to 600 words. You have no idea how many, MANY times I have cried thinking I needed to write 600 WORDS. And all of this while trying to make sure they are the right 600 words. What I have left are some observations from ten years of trying to do this work and do it respectfully. Please forgive me in advance if I have not managed to identify the correct words.

I approach the issue of diversity from the perspective of someone raised as a religious minority in the United States. A religious minority with very strong views (some of which it continues to hold today) about those who do not fit its paradigm. So I have a bit of experience being both outside and inside a dominant power structure. If you prefer a less political analogy, I spent of a lot of my early years negotiating my path between competing worldviews with their own claims to priority and attention.

The book I go back to over and over again when wrestling with these issues is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. The book opens with the author confronting the great, massive, mustachioed, history of British Learning. It continues as a consideration of the writer’s struggle to assert the right to a reading and writing identity that is uniquely her own. Reading this book in my early teens was revelatory, giving me the permission to choose my own reading identity and communities. I did not have to be bound by the lists my school gave me, or the interpretation of books my teacher endorsed. I could begin to build my own reading room.