Embarrassing Literary Riches

I’m the sort of person who starts off the new year with a Goodreads reading challenge of 100 books in a year. By February, 19 down. If you haven’t used it before, you might not understand the appeal of goodreads.com, which is a social networking site for readers, now owned by Amazon. Goodreads boasts an impressive community, with 25 million members, 29 million book reviews, and over 750 million books catalogued by user-librarians. I use the site to track my reading, receive recommendations, and feel less alone as a reader by keeping up with my friends’ reading goals and progress.

Being a reader in the United States might feel lonely when one considers the data on readership collected by The Pew Research Center and Gallup. 23 percent of Americans read no books in the past year; of those who read, 48 percent finished fewer than 10 books, less than a book a month. Only a little over a quarter of bibliophile Americans manage to break the double-digit barrier.

But these numbers without historical context are meaningless. In 1978, Gallup reported that only 8 percent of Americans averted their eyes from the typeset print on paper between the (presumably uninviting) front cover and the blurb-barbed back. Not only did more individuals read, or reported reading, in the past, they also claimed to read more as individuals—42 percent said their annual reading consisted of 11 or more books. It should go without saying, of course, that these figures are survey results, self-reported, and that respondents would have an incentive to inflate their numbers or perhaps faulty memories that caused them to round their totals down. What counts as a book is also up for discussion: Do we, or did they, consider comics, romance novels, or poetry chapbooks to count? Or is a “book” only one of those door-stopping tomes by Dickens, Tolstoy, or George Eliot?

An even more important point to consider is the question of why we should care about books, how many are read, and how many people read them. What good is it really if all of us as Americans fetishize the book, as we often do when categorically averring “the book was better than the movie”? Why should we accord books a sacral symbolism in the age when most facts can be Googled, or provided by Siri, or when even a playwright like Conor McPherson can tell an interviewer that “television is where all the creative work is”? Even poetry, in which writers freely experiment with mise-en-page, can be circulated and consumed via YouTube. Both the factual or educational and the literary uses of the book can be served, and served well, by digital means.

I don’t think we can truly be concerned, in a deep or informed way, with the fact of the decline of the reader unless we can express what we will lose as a result of this trend. I believe the decline in reading will lead to, and in fact has led to, a less robust cultural marketplace undergirded by outdated economics of publishing; and I believe we'll lose opportunities for personal growth in this mode of decline.

For the observant, the decline in print and publishing has been decades in the making, and began arguably with the decline of the newspapers in the U.S. Television news replaced the evening papers, and then the morning papers; now services like Twitter loom ominously over those that remain. It’s a free rider problem: Why purchase the New York Times if you can read the tweeted headline for free? But publishing houses have not been seen as so fragile, perhaps because of large mergers between them, such as the Random House-Penguin deal. Successful publishers are in trouble: Quercus, which published Stieg Larsson’s “Dragon Tattoo” Millennium trilogy in Britain, is up for sale, seeking to be acquired to survive. Authors themselves don’t fare much better than their publishers. The 2014 Digital Book World conference released its survey data that show that 54 percent of authors published in the traditional way (not self-published) make under $1,000 per year. Half the writers published today could give up their vocation and take up more lucrative careers in fast food.

And for those who might believe that opportunities for personal growth will not be fall by the wayside, I suggest they read the January 22 column by New York Times writer Charles Blow (if they can read). His words—“It is no exaggeration to say that those books saved me: from a life of poverty, stress, depression and isolation”—are far more eloquent than my own, but they will only resonate for readers opening newspapers, periodicals, and books, looking for ways to expand their knowledge, imagination, and selves.

Michael T. Feehly ’14 is a joint history and Scandinavian studies concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.