Is the Bookworm an Endangered Species?

In her recent biography of Condoleezza Rice, Elisabeth Bumiller tells us that Condi, a former professor and provost at Stanford University, has a curious relationship to books — curious at least for an academic. As she was growing up, Rice relates, her parents piled books up on her nightstand and the result was a distaste for reading. “She stopped reading for pleasure, and does not to this day,” Bumiller writes.

This was the strangest fact of many curious nuggets that can be gleaned from Bumiller’s work. And it left me wondering about modernity’s relationship with books. Many of the most impressive characters I know from history are book fanatics. I think of Seneca and Montaigne, both of whom developed a decided preference for books over people, seeing in them not a retreat from the world as much as a means of opening the doors to new worlds and a better class of interlocutors. As time passes, I develop more sympathy for their approach.

But the rise of mass literacy and a popular print media clearly constitute one of the markers for the modern age. In fact, for the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant it was the decisive fact which marked a break with the past and the prospect of the development of a human potential that had long been locked away. “Das lesende Publikum,” “the reading public” was this decisive new audience. And “publicity”—mass education through reading—was in his mind the critical path to the development of a new society. This unfolded in the nineteenth century into a middle class for which voracious reading was seen as a tool for social advancement—the so-called Bildungsbürgertum of Germany, the rise and transformation of universities, the birth of countless newspapers, magazines and publishing houses.

So where do we stand two hundred years after this dawn? Ursula Le Guin charts the territory in an article entitled “Staying Awake” in the current issue of Harper’s.

Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our forests; others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species, and reactions to the news are similarly various. In 2004 a National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that 43 percent of Americans polled hadn’t read a book all year, and last November, in its report “To Read or Not to Read,” the NEA lamented the decline of reading, warning that non-readers do less well in the job market and are less useful citizens in general. This moved Motoko Rich of the New York Times to write a Sunday feature in which she inquired of various bookish people why anyone should read at all. The Associated Press ran their own poll and announced last August that 27 percent of their respondents had spent the year bookless, a better figure than the NEA’s, but the tone of the AP piece was remarkable for its complacency. Quoting a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas who said, “I just get sleepy when I read,” the AP correspondent, Alan Fram, commented, “a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify.”

So Condoleezza Rice, it seems, is in good company. But Condi has it just right when she says that she does not read for pleasure:

For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class.

It’s a simple fact that in many respects, educational standards have fallen in the Western world. What was expected of high school students around the turn of the century is daunting.

I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.

To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.

Theater goers in New York who have seen the brilliant new performance of Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” know this was also the case for Middle Europe, where the spirit of adolescents was often brutally crushed under the weight of rote learning in fields of no obvious practical utility.

But the challenge of this century is a different one. It is a pendulum which has perhaps swung too far in the direction of triviality and popular appeasement. The market drives the media, to some extent, and the keepers of high culture seem to fade into the background. And, as Le Guin argues, technology offers up a great diversity of paths to transmitting information and plot lines. Reading requires an active imagination; it takes an effort.

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?. . .

Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.

What, blogging has developed no aesthetic form?! Le Guin needs to spend more time surfing the internet. But I’m with her on the rest of it. And indeed, the greatest gift of the internet comes in the fact that masses of accumulated learning can be stored on line and made immediately accessible, with tools to understand the details one doesn’t know. It seems to me that Google Books and comparable resources offered up by dozens of academic libraries around the world may be the most important advance that the internet has offered in the last two or three years. For instance, I recently went searching for one of my favorite Meister Eckehart sermons on the web and found among other sources a fourteenth century manuscript fully imaged and accessible from a cloister library in Switzerland. You could almost feel the crackling, buckling parchment on which it was written. It gave me a bit of a workout reading the Gothic fraktur, but being able to absorb an original illuminated manuscript in the comfort of your own study is quite something. What was the great Library of Alexandria compared to this?

Le Guin also offers us the conventional complaint against the publishing industry and its standards.

To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off—it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists. . .

To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

Better of course that they should feed Moloch with midlist authors than with children. But the other point lurking here and made quite brilliantly by Arthur Schopenhauer some 150 years ago goes to the industry’s obsession with always shoveling something brand new under our noses, something with a hint of scandal, but the product of an abysmally poor or thoroughly conventional mind. The past offers better writers, better ideas, more helpful friends. But it does not offer the sort of material that can be sold profitably in airport bookshops and in drugstores. Or will it?

Le Guin in any event comes back to this inevitable point: the distinction between true literature and the trivial, and its relevance to the world of commerce.

So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of the publishers they bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay binders and editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, while plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?

Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.

Reading, I firmly believe, is a source of relief from tyrants. Both for individuals and societies.

Do they still devote so much of the school day to showing social engineering films? They used to use 16mm projectors from the AV department.

From the the post war era up through the 1980s (as video came into the classrooms), they were commonplace. And studies have been done on the messages they tried to impart on students (sometimes effectively, sometimes giving the wrong message).

"I, too, have been increasingly disillusioned by Condee Rice, the more I see of her. She certainly has some good qualities, but they seem to appear at rarer and rarer intervals these days."

I have to give Condie credit for staying with the Administration for the full two terms. I can't it imagine it's been a picnic for any of them, but she didn't turn tail and run, and has remained loyal to the President all this time. I'm thinking she's tired of the Washington scene, tired of the putz's in the State Department, and is doing only what is necessary just to get by. I felt the same way about my employer and the job in the months before I retired. Why bust your ass when everything you do will more than likely be thrown out when a new Administration comes in. At this point, I'm thinking she's going to keep a low profile until her time is done.

you have to start as a young person reading what you like and not what is forced upon you

I read a lot of crap when I was young...I out grew it.

I have read a lot of very informative and inspirational stuff after I had my fill of pablum...I grew up...

She’s Presbyterian.

From her remarks at Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, I am a Presbyterian. (Laughter.) But I want to tell you why I’m a Presbyterian. I trace the roots of my faith back to my granddaddy. Granddaddy Rice was a poor sharecropper’s son in Eutaw, Alabama. That’s E-u-t-a-w, Alabama. (Laughter.) And one day he decided he was going to get book learning, so he asked where a colored man could go to college. And they told him that there was this little school called Stillman College. It was about 60 miles away from where he lived and he could go to Stillman College and get an education. So Granddaddy Rice saved up his tuition, saved up his cotton, and he went off to school and he finished his first year, and they said, “Well, that’s very good. Now how are you going to pay for your second year?” And he said, “Well, I’m fresh out of cotton.” And they said, “Well, you’ll have to leave.”

And he said, “Well, how are those boys going to college?” And they said, “Well, they have what’s called a scholarship. And if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too.” (Laughter.) Well, my granddaddy said, “You know, that’s exactly what I had in mind.” (Laughter.) And my family has been college educated and Presbyterian ever since. (Laughter and applause.)

I sometimes use a magnifying glass to get a closer look at the bookcases pictured in magazines.

LOL!

I thought I was the only one that did that. ;-) Too funny.

I read a lot (usually average a few books a week), and where books are concerned, it's more fiction than not. Currently reading C.S. Lewis' Perelandra. I love his writing...

...being able to absorb an original illuminated manuscript in the comfort of your own study is quite something. What was the great Library of Alexandria compared to this?

Project Gutenberg is pretty impressive. I think the author has misconstrued a shift in reading emphasis to be a diminishment in reading itself. It isn't. I read more on the Internet than I did as a book-a-day junkie. I've cut the latter habit back to a more manageable book a week or even two if I'm feeling lazy. But I read around 12 hours a day between work and leisure.

What the Internet also offers is a way for a hugely greater number of people to have their words read. I agree with the author that some of the changes within the commercial publishing industry have become cramped and self-destructive, but I and my fellow FReepers don't depend on it. (Good thing, too, because it's a b17ch to find an agent these days. Ask me.) But I'm being published just as soon as I hit the Post button. That's a power no common man ever had in all of history.

What is happening with the Internet is absolutely compelling intellectually. We're in the middle of a ferment whose issue we cannot imagine. Twenty years from now it will seem peaceful.

I love CS Lewis. He and I share Nov 29 as our birthday. Although he is MUCH older than I. ;)
I am currently reading Screwtape Letters for about the 5th time. My husband and I are in a local CS Lewis study group.

How funny about the magnifying glass I thought I was the only one who did that. lol I read a mix fiction and non-fiction. At present in addition to Screwtape, I am reading Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe by Stanley Hauerwas, Ben Quash, and Michael Ward. Next I have a couple books about Islam.

My 11 yr old daughter has started listening to audio books. She already is a slow reader due to speech issues, and then she had a grand mal seizure in October. She was put on anti-seizure medication that made her stutter when she would read, so she stopped reading. Her teacher recommended the audio books for my daughter, and it has worked wonderfully. She is required at school to take these onlines tests for books she has read, and the teacers are okay with her listening to the books.

We’ve switched anti-seizure medication, and the stuttering is less. However, my daughter is still enjoying listening to the books. She can listen to more advanced books that are more interesting to her, and she can do it in a few days. She still reads other books, but she really is liking the audio books. She follows along in the regular book.

Anyway, we’re a big fan of audio books now. (My other two kids are huge readers. Both of them are way above grade level and read tons and tons of books.)

One of my daughters falls asleep surrounded by about 10 books. She’s just finished the Series of Unfortunate Events books. It took her a few weeks to read them all, and now she is very sad to be done with them. She was sad after reading Harry Potter also.

She reads more than I ever did at that age.

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