#11 The Missing Section in the Bookshop

Why is it so hard to find the books I want to read?

Dear friends,

How do you organise your bookshelves?

I was asked to describe my personal system in an interview earlier this year.

This is what I said:

I allow my bookshelves to get messy. I like them to have an unruly, organic feel: books mixing with papers, pictures, stationery, post-its, knick-knacks and stacks of my completed diaries.

My books are organised by theme. Some are clear-cut (poetry, theory, diaries) and some are more instinctive: lyrical non-fiction writers who just seem to belong together; or books concerned with interconnecting social issues; or a section of ‘books that contain the world’, encyclopaedic texts like Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book or Moby-Dick or Montaigne’s essays.

A lot of my favourite books are tricky to categorise. When I’m browsing in bookshops, they pop up in different places.

What’s the right section for The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Stuart by Alexander Masters or In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado? They don’t sit neatly on any single shelf.

When my book Into the Night: A Year with the Police came out earlier this year, friends sent me photos of it in all sorts of sections in different bookshops: Biography, Politics, Memoir, Contemporary Ideas and even History.

On one level this isn’t a big deal. On another, it reflects a feeling I’ve had for a long time: that the books I want to write and the books I love to read do not have an obvious space in the bookshop. I feel like there’s a section missing.

If you’re interested in society and community, people and place, social change and social institutions, there is no single section to find and browse those books. As a consequence, a coherent picture of what is being written and thought about social questions is difficult to grasp; any sense that there is a community of writers focused on these themes is absent. It’s hard to find books with shared social themes and, as such, hard to draw connections between them. Dispersed around the bookshop, their collective power is diluted.

This feels like a problem and an oversight to me. We badly need richer imaginative resources to navigate our biggest social challenges. The lack of a distinct section in the bookshop implies a lack of both urgency and interest.

I’m not sure what this new section would be called. Perhaps just ‘Society’: a loose label, like ‘Science’ or ‘Travel’, which could hold a broad family of texts.

Is it realistic to imagine that bookshops might create a new section? Perhaps not without a clear motivation to do so. But it’s definitely plausible. Bookshops often recategorise their shelves in response to rising and waning trends. One notable example is the rise of ‘Nature Writing’ over the last twenty years. As an undergraduate, I was briefly taught by Robert Macfarlane, a leading light in that field. But when I first searched for his books in 2007, I found one in Mountaineering and another in Garden Writing. Nature Writing sections weren’t a thing then; now it’s hard to imagine a bookshop without one.

My concern about the missing section in the bookshop relates to another, deeper, concern: that there’s a shortage of books to go in it.

Looking at the booming shelves of nature writing, at the waves of books on climate and the environment, medicine and health, I feel troubled by the lack of an equivalent wave of non-fiction exploring our big social questions, and by the lack of an equivalent audience reading and sharing them. Where are all the lively, lyrical, widely-read books about care, community and education? I can name multiple blockbuster books by doctors and nurses, but not one by a social worker. My sense that something is amiss was deepened on reading a blog by my friend Iona about her own struggles to find a rich, diverse range of books that address the social questions she cares about. There are great books out there, but seemingly far fewer than in adjacent fields.

The thing I find strangest is that there’s no shortage of drama, humour, depth, diversity or urgency in human stories about care, community, social change and social justice. They can be irresistibly compelling, poignant and mind-expanding. They can change how we see, how we think and how we act in the world. And there are so many stories to tell, so many voices to be heard, and so many underexplored questions to dive into.

So what’s going on?

Is it because caring work and social professions are radically undervalued that fewer people are drawn to write or read about them?

Do people see these themes as earnest or worthy?

Is it that everyday realities of care and community are the aspects of life people want to escape from when they read, rather than the stories they want to escape into?

Does the lack of a clear canon or tradition in this space make it more difficult to coalesce the work of those writing now?

Is the lack of diversity in publishing disproportionately affecting themes like care and social change, where the diversity of those involved is so much higher?

Or is it that the most exciting work in this space is occurring elsewhere? In fiction perhaps, or beyond books, in music, theatre or film.

I’m not sure, but for a while now I’ve been assembling a list of non-fiction books on social themes, which I could imagine sitting together in a new ‘Society’ section of the bookshop.

Below is the latest iteration. It encompasses literary non-fiction, poetry, memoir, essays, polemic, ethnography, oral history, lively academic works, and many texts that blur and blend these modes.

This list may be too elastic but I’m finding it useful as a way to start cohering what’s going on in this area. All sorts of texts are missing, of course. This is a selection of books I know and like, not a systematic survey.

If you have suggestions for additions, or other reflections on this missing section in the bookshop, please do drop a line or leave a comment. I’d love to hear any reactions or recommendations. And if you know others who might enjoy critiquing and adding to this list, I’d be grateful if you could pass it on.

Warm wishes,

Matt

Books for a new Society section in the bookshop

Ahmed, Sara, Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021).

Ashon, Will, The Passengers (Faber, 2022).

Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time (Penguin, 1963).

Beard, Alex, Natural Born Learners (W&N, 2018).

Berger, John, A Seventh Man (Viking, 1975).

Berlant, Lauren, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke, 2022).

Bernard, Jay, Surge (Vintage, 2019).

Bittner, Egon, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society (National Institute of Mental Health, 1970).

Boakye, Jeffrey, Hold Tight (Influx, 2017).

Briggs, Kate, The Long Form (Fitzcarraldo, 2023).

Brown, Adrienne Maree, Emergent Strategy (AK, 2017).

Bunting, Madeleine, Labours of Love (Granta, 2020).

Christie, Nils, Crime Control as Industry (Routledge, 1993).

Cottam, Hilary, Radical Help (Virago, 2018).

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me (One World, 2015).

Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (MacGibbon and Kee, 1972).

Cole, Teju, Black Paper (University of Chicago, 2023).

Corrigan, Paul, Schooling the Smash Street Kids (Macmillan, 1979).

Cusk, Rachel, A Life’s Work (Faber, 2001).

Davis, Angela Y., Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Hamish Hamilton, 2022).

Desmond, Matthew, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Allen Lane, 2016).

Dowling, Emma, The Care Crisis (Verso, 2021).

Eddo-Lodge, Reni, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (Bloomsbury Circus, 2017).

Elkin, Lauren, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus, 2016).

Fassin, Didier, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity Press: 2013)

Femi, Caleb, Poor (Penguin, 2020).

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (Allen Lane, 1977).

Ghosh, Amitav, Uncanny and Improbable Events (Penguin, 2021).

Goffman, Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Penguin, 1961).

Greif, Mark, Against Everything (Verso, 2016).

Hall, Stuart, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978).

Haraway, Donna, Staying with the trouble (Duke, 2016).

Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Serpent’s Tail, 2019).

Hendren, Sara, What Can a Body Do: How we meet the built world (Riverhead Books, 2020).

hooks, bell, All About Love (Morrow, 2000).

Jamison, Leslie, The Empathy Exams (Granta, 2015).

Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961).

Johnson, Linton Kwesi, Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006).

Jones, Tobias, Utopian Dreams (Faber, 2007).

Kenway, Emily, Who Cares (Wildfire, 2023).

Laing, Olivia, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate, 2016).

Le Blanc, Adrian Nicole, Random Family (Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Louis, Edouard, The End of Eddy (Vintage, 2018).

Machado, Carmen Maria, In the Dream House (Serpent’s Tail, 2019).

Masters, Alexander, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Fourth Estate, 2005).

Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 3 vols (London, 1851).

Miller, Kei, Things I Have Withheld (Canongate, 2021).

Morland, Polly, A Fortunate Woman (Picador, 2022).

Nelson, Maggie, The Argonauts (Melville House, 2015) and On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Jonathan Cape, 2021).

Odell, Jenny, How to Do Nothing (Melville House, 2014).

Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (Gollancz, 1937).

Owusu, Derek (ed.), Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (Trapeze, 2019).

Park Hong, Cathy, Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition (Profile, 2020).

Parker, Tony, The Unknown Citizen (Hutchinson, 1963) and People of the Streets (Cape, 1968).

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal, 2018).

Puig de la Bellacasa, María, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (University of Minnesota, 2017).

Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Rankine, Claudia, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Penguin, 2004) and Citizen (Penguin, 2014).

Robinson, Roger, A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press, 2019).

Sandhu, Sukhdev, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (HarperCollins, 2003).

Sennett, Richard, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Penguin, 2012).

Skinner, Mim, Living Together (Footnote, 2022).

Solnit, Rebecca, Hope in the Dark (Canongate, 2004).

Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (Hamish Hamilton, 2003).

Thapar, Ciaran, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City (Viking, 2021).

The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (Verso, 2020).

Vitale, Alex S., The End of Policing (Verso, 2017).

Wacquant, Loïc, Urban Outcasts (Polity Press, 2008).

Winnicott, Donald, Deprivation and Delinquency (Tavistock, 1984).