Somehow the AP manages to make this sound like bad news:
One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.
To me, it sounds like an improvement over the situation a few years ago:
In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a 4 percentage point drop in a decade.
Yet the AP goes on to thunder:
Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn’t read a single book this year?
The derision is misplaced. Some fifteen years ago, in 1993, Philip Roth, crying the same tune, nevertheless gave this argument (that readers are superior to non-readers) nuance and heft—not by sneering at the dolts who don’t bother to read at all but by praising “serious” readers above all others:
“There’s been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That’s inescapable. We can’t fail to see it. It’s also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That’s a tragedy. By readers, I don’t mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I’m going to read for two hours. That’s what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don’t watch television or answer the phone.
“So if that’s what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I’ve described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that’s it, and that is bizarre.”
Roth was joking, of course. … Or was he?
One thing’s for sure: Times have changed. You would never see Roth’s kind of elitism in the pages of today’s New York Times Book Review.
Though you do, of course, see some astonishing things.
Such as, for example, Howard Zinn asserting that there is no moral distinction between terrorism (the intent to kill innocent civilians) and the inadvertent killing of innocent civilians during war:
The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.
Or, for example, a “reviewer” extolling the poetry that has emerged (with the blessing of the U.S. Army) from the hideous torture chambers of Guantanamo and, for good measure, claiming that it is completely unfair to, you know, criticize the poetry:
The poems — some by accomplished writers, others by first-time poets — suffer “some flaws,” as the book’s editor, Marc Falkoff, himself a lawyer for 17 detainees, puts it. It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture.
See, criticism is beside the point coming from a book critic. This book is beyond criticism. It’s your moral duty as an American to read it.
You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.
And guess what? Despite this nonsense, I still love to read—not only books but even the New York Times Book Review.
Reading is here to stay for a good long while. But our narrative forms are changing, and our human craving for narrative—for stories—can be satisfied in many different ways, through many different gadgets and many media channels. Why, maybe we’re evolving. Fancy that!
