I Come Here Not To Praise Books, But To Bury Them!

Sooooo...reading.... The newspapers are dying. Books are threatened. Kindle is being suggested as “the next big thing” for reading books, newspapers and magazines. Dogs are sleeping with cats, we have a socialist in the White House and apparently all is NOT right with the world. But what about reading.

I was brought to this rant by my friends at Borders. I like Borders more then Barnes & Noble. I am told if I go to the Barnes and Noble at West County it will change my mind but as a matter of preference I prefer Borders. Cannot tell you why. Perhaps they at first seemed less corporate. I still feel guilty every time I do not go to locally owned Left Bank Books but they are inconvenient and book shopping for me is always spur of the moment.

Anyway...the Rant was started by my quest for Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler”. It is a remarkable book and I had a friend who I wanted to give it to a friend who is struggling a little in his professional and personal life. It is a great primer on fishing and contemplation and has been in publication for 350 years which is no mean feat. Which leads us to Borders. They didn’t have it in stock.

I have gotten use to their stocking system and that they only have best seller hardbacks and paper backs by mainstream authors but you can always find the classics tucked somewhere in some form. It was like going to a book store and not being able to by “Old Man and the Sea” or “Crime and Punishment” or the “The Grapes of Wrath”. How can this be?

It has been explained to me that only assholes read. I hope that this is not true. Not because i do not want to be labeled an asshole but because over all I do believe most people are not assholes so I continue to hope that most people will read. Readers have probably caused our own demise with condescending (assholes) people like me pretentiously dismissing other peoples books, popular books, Grisham novels, self help literature and of course religious books (other then the Bible). Readers as a stereotype are not lovable but seriously, we need to read.

Never has our world been more in need of people reading, talking and thinking about difficult, big concepts. Forget about National Health Care for a minute and think about the challenges of world population growth, a global economy, nuclear war and yes, even though by a recent poll well over 70% of Republicans think it is myth, global warming (in 2007 only 23% of Republican Senators thought it had been proven to any reasonable certainty, even after President Bush had come around).
Despite what people might tell you, reading is good. I have been hugely benefitted by reading a lot. When you read it expands your vocabulary dramatically. People often (almost always in my experience) confuse a large vocabulary with intelligence. I am a living refutation of that theory. It also can challenge your own thought processes. While I believe fiction and non fiction have value I have a heart for fiction. Reading other peoples constructs and losing yourself in them can initiate thought processes that examining the factual world can never arrive at. 

Fiction is not for everyone. Grown men seem to eschew it instead reading books on management techniques, money making techniques, organizational techniques, sports books and sometimes porn. Women are more likely to relax with a book and I guess I am nothing if not womanly. I like all kinds of fiction but prefer modern authors and hate anything Irish. James Joyce and his legion of followers remind me of the new big hat country music that sounds like the Eagles. Everyone is so concerned about being so authentic and if you want to be that authentic then do it like Joyce and like Hank williams and drink yourself yourself to death.

My favorite authors are people like Richard Russo, Madison Smartt (two T’s) Bell and Cormac Mc carthy but I also have a lot of Grisham Books, every murder mystery by Jonathan Sanford and a large embarrassing number of volumes of Dick Francis’ horse race mysteries. I like em all. I am not really, despite my pretenses, a very selective or discriminating reader. As i think I stated in an old blog my book collection has been likened (by a former friend) to a Barnes & Noble remainder sale.
I guess my question is whether people are really not reading or whether people have never read. Sometime when you get a minute hit this site:

http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp#literacystatistics

It will tell you among other things that:

“When the State of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade. “ (poor readers, more prisoners)

“46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine. “ (How does that effect health care reform? How about the cost of health care?)

“U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy”. (Makes competing in a global economy pretty tough).

I don’t know what all that means but it would seem that reading might be linked to some types of success in our society. But how are we going to read? The Kindle is all the rage among the reading intelligentsia but the Luddites among us like our books. It will be interesting to see where these reading devices take us. Will I really read my paper on it? Will I even want to read the Post Dispatch on it? I like the feel of a news paper like I like the fell and the smell of a book. I cannot imaging having a machine in my hands with display screen being at all esthetically satisfying or soothing. It seems like work. Then there is also the issue of someone knowing what I am reading and recently we had Amazon zap and erase off of everyone’s Kindles copies of Orwell’s “1984” which evidently came from an inappropriate source. Ironic? Sure. Chilling? Maybe.

Encourage someone to read. Buy a book. Buy a used book. Buy a paperback. Read a magazine that does not talk about Jon and Kate’s troubles but read. Encourage other people to read and stop wasting so much damn time on line. There is no there, there.