When I was in grad school, I did not think my day-to-day work as a librarian would regularly include asking people the question, “How do you feel about World War II?” (Other things I did not think I would have the opportunity to say: “I’m afraid we don’t have any cookbooks about that because the FDA banned it in 1960” and “No, I don’t know Bill Huizenga’s cell phone number.”)

The WWII question usually comes up during a certain type of reference interview: reader’s advisory (or RA, if you wanna be hip with the librarians). RA is the process of figuring out what kinds of things a person likes to read and what sort of things they might like in the future. It usually starts with a question like “what’s the last thing you read and enjoyed” or “what do you normally read” and (ideally) ends with the patron holding a book that they have a pretty good chance of liking. Pro tip: If the patron’s answer to either of those questions is “oh, I like everything,” they are a liar.

Naturally, RA is easiest when the patron reads the same things that you’re drawn to. Tragically, very few of the people who ask me for book recommendations are into grimdark fantasy novels, queer children’s comics, and quirky non-fiction about math. C’est la vie; part of being a good librarian is knowing how to find out what you don’t know, but there is a tiny, bibliophilic part of me that dies every time I have to recommend a book I have not actually read. Given the demographics of my service area, this happens quite a bit—most often when the patron is a fan of historical fiction, which, despite my English and history majors and apart from a few notable exceptions, I generally do not read.

Hence the WWII question, to which the answer is usually some variation of “WWII’s good.” And that’s a good thing because there are a lot of books set during WWII. There are cozy mysteries. There are spy thrillers. There are classics and romances and members of the oblique and sexist-sounding “women’s fiction.” (And that’s not even counting mildly nepotistic memoirs, weirdly partisan non-fiction, and 600-page door stoppers about specific types of airplanes.)

This makes sense. WWII was kind of a big deal and much of this literature is well-constructed and valuable, but it seems to me that we find ourselves returning to this time period not because we wish to reexamine it but because it has become comfortable. It might seem strange to describe a global event that cost some eighty-five million people their lives with the same adjective that Kohl’s uses to describe underwear, but that doesn’t make it less apt.

In America, WWII feels simple. It’s history class on cruise control. It’s the thing that Superman was created to fight. It’s good guys versus bad guys, and we’re the good guys and we won. Even our grimmest mainstream depictions of WWII—the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, for example—are generally content-dark, not context-dark. Yes, it is a visceral sort of disturbing to watch a man carry his own severed arm through a wasteland of nonchalant murder. And yes, many people die and in gruesome ways, but their deaths matter. The sacrifices are worth it, the reinforcements swoop in, and they save Private Ryan. American flag, roll credits. As Kate Beaton puts it, “Ugly people and other countries may have fought Nazis, but we’ll never know for sure.”

But the simplicity of WWII teeters atop of a mountain of conditionals. WWII is simple if we draw straight lines between who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. It’s simple if we let enemy atrocities justify all others. It’s simple if we ignore the fact that Nazism in this country is not as passé as it once was.

I’m not arguing for fewer books about WWII, exactly. And I’m certainly not arguing for fewer books about war (our capacity and need for it, some have argued, is part of what makes us human). But I will ask for more and better stories that interrogate the less examined historical conflicts, that don’t assume America to be the protagonist, and that don’t end with cute white families and proud, waving flags.

The irony of all this is that even if I found those books or if more of them were written, I wouldn’t offer them to patrons who come to my desk looking for comfortable historical fictiongood RA is giving the reader what they want, not what you want them to want. But who knows. Maybe I’m not the only one looking for discomfort in the past. Then when the answer to the WWII question is “thanks but no thanks,” I’ll have something better to offer.

 

Header image courtesy of the San Diego Air and Space Museum.

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