Why is every book I read about rape?

Two years ago, I received a hand-me-down, soon-to-be-replaced, uninspired gift that changed my life: my kindle.

I am a firm believer that my kindle will outlive me, my children, my grandchildren, the sun, the moon, and the stars. It’s beaten up, unable to display color, barely a touchscreen, and slow-to-type, but my kindle is one of the best things to happen to me.

Before it, I read, yes, but my reading style lacked fervor, focus, and passion. And now, I read everywhere: the tops of mountains, in crowded sports bars, on the streetcar, on the Stairmaster, and so much more.

My Goodreads exemplifies this progress - in the past two and a half years (roughly the same amount of time I’ve had Cloud IX) I’ve read 122 books. And I’ve read it all - from the cute, binge-able Emily Henry romantic comedies in Great Big Beautiful Life, theo-anthropological origins of misogyny in When God Was a Woman, philosophical manifestos on psychological hedonism and Man’s Search for Meaning, world-shaking speculative fiction on eternal return in Cloud Atlas, deft and off-beat mystery through the Thursday Murder Club, and classics like Paradise Lost.

Each one of these novels presents its own version of the world that I am provided the autonomy to step into. Worlds where love is possible, where characters take it upon themselves to make the world better around them, where the oppressed overcome the oppressors, where Belly Conklin has to choose between two brothers that are simultaneously whiny, brooding, and popular (from one Belly to another, I need you to know that other men exist).

Just for fun, here’s the top ten books I have read recently, in no particular order:

• Cloud Atlas

• Cloud Cuckoo Land

• Project Hail Mary

• How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates

• The Best Way to Bury Your Husband

• The God of Endings

• Orbital

• Annie Bot

• The Wedding People

• When God Was a Woman

I’ve read novel after novel, flipped through eras, timelines, planets, and populations. But out of the 122 novels I’ve read, a trend started to emerge. Of the 122 books,

• 58 included sexual harassment, coercive gender dynamics, or institutional misogyny.

• 30 contained rape or explicit sexual assault.

• 78 were centrally concerned with the ways gender roles constrain human behavior.

In a post-#MeToo era, these numbers are unsurprising. Books nowadays are resonating with a larger cultural appetite to reinterpret past trauma, examine the systems that have perpetuated power dynamics, and reclaim the narrative.

However, as long as humans have told stories, there has been a tension between individual freedom and structure, and between the power and the people who live beneath it. When agency is compromised, when dominion is imbalanced, when the conflict that binds us strikes, the self has an opportunity to grow. As sexual harassment, coercion, and abuse appear with striking frequency across literary genres (classics, romance, thrillers, speculative fiction, and mysteries), it’s worth diving into how contemporary fiction has constructed that notion of trust under asymmetry, and how we can metabolize these stories to learn from the past, and grow alongside the narrative.

This (and next) week, I’ll be embarking on a mini-series surrounding the post-MeToo cultural context of popular literature, and how we as readers are impacted as a result. This was intended to be one article, but as I wrote and wrote, the points felt rushed and messy, deserving a second, more well-informed look. I’ll be diving into second-wave feminism, detailed studies about harassment in publishing, narratology, and more. Besides, if I’ve learned anything from my new hobby, it’s that the most interesting stories rarely fit neatly into a single chapter.

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