The Last Readers

Conspiracy Theories On Illiteracy's Triumph

By Ellen Wernecke

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illustration by Jeffrey Wood
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You want to see finger pointing? Don't work for FEMA. Just hang out with literary industry types these days. More people are buying books than ever before, and books are creating major media events with midnight releases and front-page New York Times articles, yet never have books been so far outside of the national discussion. What was the big book this summer besides Harry Potter and a Lot of Virgin Evergreen Forests? Sure, everyone was talking about hatchet job The Truth About Hillary, and the Dracular doorstop The Historian, but how many people actually read them? 2005 has been a great year for where-have-all-the-readers-gone conspiracy theories, none of which are particularly strong. Consider:

It's The Technology

The most common post-millennial theory of non-readership has been that newer technologies have the once-mighty book in a choke hold. After all, the Victorian bourgeois family with a radio might choose to turn on an address instead of having young Quentin read aloud, and they wouldn't call it a TV dinner if Sis and Junior had Lady Chatterley's Lover propped open on their trays. (That would be one way to bring up the proverbial "birds and the bees.") Anyone worth his McLuhan will explain that books offer less "sensory participation" but more facts, making them what he calls a "hot" or high-information medium which the TV-addled, being used to low-info programming, find too trying to digest.

Of course, with the advent of even more advanced technologies such as books-on-CD/iPod and the Internet, the stakes have suddenly been raised. A May 25th New York Times story called "Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading!" featured audio-book connoisseurs defending their headphone habits as equivalent to reading. The Styles section story, which had in no way an editorialized headline, featured writers like one Rich Cohen, who considered audio books suitable for "book[s] he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading"—in this case Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One wonders what Cohen would say if one of his own readers made such a statement about his book. Further New York Times tech columns have given readers websites at which to search for classic-novel podcasts, Internet-ready radio-style broadcasts, a scheme curiously resembling the "Executive Book Summaries" service advertised in the back of airplane magazines.

Is reading such a labor-saving intensive device activity after all? Do we need machines to do it for us? I wonder, that we need machines to do it for us. Of course, there are situations where audio books are preferable to the hard copies—when driving, for instance—but I don't think the book-on-tape ranks with, say, the vacuum cleaner or the automatic washer as a celebration of mechanic efficiency. But these so-called readers protest that they're just as good as people who are actually running their fingers across printed lines. Imagine if that kind of philosophy were to be applied to first-grade curricula—which, for all I know, it may soon be.

It's The Schools

One of my fourth grade assignments was to read what we called ORBs, outside reading books, for half an hour each day. My reading habit had developed somewhat earlier and was pretty fixed by then, but making "outside" reading a homework assignment alerted parents, and to a lesser extent we kids, that reading is a good thing. The freedom to pick what we were reading (within some limits) and a time, not results-driven activity fooled us into seeing out ORBs as a break from other homework, not homework itself.

However, as with the early '90s Apple computer salmon fishing game and the abacus, the book as an educational technology is on its way out. Thanks to rolling waves of testing wrought by No Child Left Behind, many schools would rather children use more interactive reading tools, like computer programs or LeapFrogs, so they can track their progress in read-the-isolated-block-of-text-and-answer-the-questions format. At the risk of losing funding, schools need to make sure their students can read—if "reading" is what one really does on standardized tests. After all, it's hard to tell if a child understands every word of Arthur's Halloween, but quizzes and games can reveal reading comprehension easily.

Sometimes, the elimination of books from schools is a budget measure. The California state senate's education committee is currently sitting on AB756, a bill that if passed would prohibit school districts or the Board of Education from adopting materials over 200 pages long. History Textbooks? Moby Dick? Gone. Sure, every child in the state will sit up straighter, but is length really a good judge of a book's merit? And if so, would the legislature also make On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, required high school reading? At only 68 pages, it certainly won't break the back or the budget.

Yet there's something to be lost from not physically turning pages, in not being able to choose from every book in the library instead of a short list of pre-formulated stories designed to hammer in new vocabulary and grammatical structures. Children who might not "take" to conventional children's lit may find their passions in other genres, instead of being bound to read one historical fiction, one biography, one sports story. Paper-and-ink books allow children to center reading within the object of the book, to treasure their favorite books as they would a teddy bear. The physical book, objectifying the oft-heard tale, makes them more likely to feel comfortable in, and thus support the libraries and bookstores of the future, if indeed there are any left.

It's A Passing Fad

But the craziest theory of non-readership this year so far may be the truest—and thus the hardest for inveterate readers like me to accept. The U.K. Guardian-originated argument goes something like: Reading used to be the territory of the leisure class, but it is now falling out of favor and will eventually be replaced by something else.

Back when only the wealthy could afford extravagant calf-bound sets of Chaucer and Dumas, let alone have time to read them, reading was an outward sign of worldly success. These days the insanely rich don't read more than the rest of us. Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham just admitted, shamelessly, that she had never read a book. "I do love fashion magazines," she added helpfully, just in case one mistakes the September Vogue for the new Salman Rushdie (or her own autobiography, Learning to Fly). Was there a backlash? Hardly. The BBC even helpfully pointed out that one in four Brits hasn't read a book in the past year.

While it's true that reading gained a lot of ground across class and social lines since, the early modern era, the type of person to buy a Zadie Smith book in hardcover is still likely to have a college education, a high discretionary income and a salaried full-time job. In other words, the class lines in reading still haven't exactly disappeared; they have just become a little more invisible. A good public library ought to contradict this trend, but a lot of people don't have access to one even when people have access to one, they often don't use them. (Smith herself recently said, "only a few weirdoes in America read," though this will not stop me from reading her probably excellent latest novel.)

The lack of social capital attached to reading nowadays, the difficulty of talking about leisure reading among those who do, and the shamelessness and apparent cachet carried by those who don't may convince would-be readers it's just not worth the effort. Jonathan Franzen's 1996 state-of-the-novel polemic "How to Be Alone" posits one clear idea: that reading is hard, lonely work that most people aren't willing to put in. And if reading won't elevate them socially outside of a book club or university, it becomes even less appealing. Franzen doesn't seem to mind so much that people find reading hard, but again, the prevailing attitude that books are a grind upon more useful or fun pursuits vindicates non-readers by elevating the drudgery of the few leisure readers left.

The finger-pointing will probably never stop within and outside the book industry and literary circles (who may, themselves, be at fault for sinking their ships with "literary" novels that about ten people will read, and for promoting those books at the expense of others). But what interests me most is how, or if, as a leisure reader and potential member of the publishing industry, I can keep leisure reading from going the way of court jesters and pet monkeys—that is, of prior ages' fripperies which are now the provinces only of the viciously eccentric. None of these latest theories account for what an individual can do to stem the tide —giving books as presents, for example, or starting unabashed books-centric conversations outside of class. After all, let's not kid ourselves, hokey celebrity campaigns like "Get caught reading!" (featuring '90s A-list stars like Boyz 2 Men) never work. I believe that reading doesn't have to be a solitary and dreaded activity, but rather one which we discuss because we enjoy it, in which the contents of out bookshelves move about among friends as freely as the songs on out iTunes. I still believe reading is better than high-tech forms of entertainment and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I still think there's hope for a newer, brighter world where mp3s can coexist with Margaret Atwood and where, when I cross the Main Green on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I can see a few relaxed, satisfied students so deep in their books they don't see the Frisbees crossing overhead.

Ellen Wernecke B'06 loves a bunch of authors.

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