You May Be Able to Get There From Here

In Harpers, Ursula Le Guin writes about how the end of books will not happen any time soon. She considers how book readers these days are readers by choice, since reading is no longer the activity of requirement, popular entertainment, or status that it used to be:

Even during what I have called the “century of the book,” when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don’t know how many, because we didn’t have polls to worry us about it.

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“If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or other media aren’t readily available, or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?”

Le Guin’s is concerned for the future of books, but it is not too much of a technological concern. Rather, she observes that much of the trouble for books comes from publishers:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

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[According to CEO's] a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them—or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

As Le Guin’s is saying, the big publishers and book sellers mainly promote and sell mass market, disposable books (whether hard or paper bound) in order to turn quick profits. This reminded me of something I read by writer and programmer, Paul Graham,

I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As long as it isn’t floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book.

Graham’s broader point is that book publishers have come around to the idea that they sell media more than they sell physical objects, but that book publishers cannot sell books the same way movie and music studios sell their content.

The book, regardless of its form, is consumed with special care that Le Guin describes beautifully,

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

I’ve read no more of Dan Brown’s books than reading over a chapter of The Da Vinci Code. Because his books inspire so much enmity¹ among other writers who make much less money, I’ve wanted to impersonate the Typical-Brown-Reader and earnestly read one of Brown’s books. It’s doubtful if I ever would have completed this reading (or been earnest about it), however, so I decided to fortify my distaste for a author I’ve never read with the Telegraph’s list of worst sentences in The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code:

“Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.” Opening Sentences of Deception Point.

My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 3

“Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.” Angels and Demons, chapter 1

“He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.” The Lost Symbol, chapter 1

“Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.” Deception Point, chapter 8

Related Readings

• Several Writers Discuss Brown and The Lost Symbol in the Vulture Reading Room
• Jean Hannah Edelstein, I don’t Hate Dan Brown
• Stephen Amidon on The Lost Symbol in The Sunday Times

1. My favorite item of disgust for Brown: There is a Facebook page, I Hate Dan Brown Strictly for Literary Reasons. [↩]

Pierre Bayard has compelling argument for discussing books that you’ve never touched in a Guardian Op-Ed.

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated.

Bayard does not exactly say one should lie about the books they’ve read, but he does offer that we can no many thing about books unread:

Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

 Fittingly, Bayard has authored How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.