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Before going to bed last night, earlier than usual due to the onset of a head cold, I read an interesting essay by Ursula K. Le Guin in this month's Harper's entitled: "Staying Awake, Notes on the alleged decline of reading." Not sure if anyone else has seen or read or commented on it yet? (Am woefully behind on the reading of flist, sorry.)
In the essay, she discusses two polls, one by the National Endowment of the Arts and one by The Associated Press - which both stated that readership of fictional works has been in a sharp decline. She does question the accuracy of the two polls, stating NEA polled 13,000 adults and stated only 46.7 percent read any book, yet oddly excluded "non-fiction" from "literature" in its polls, "so that you could have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and the entire Letters and Diaries of Virigina Woolf that year and yet be counted as not having read anything of literary value." Proof that polling remains an inaccurate science at best and doesn't tell us very much. But you already figured that out just by watching the New Hampshire primaries. Doesn't stop us from doing it though - that and list making, for some reason.
At any rate, in the AP poll - the AP correspondent, Alan Fram - quotes a telecommunications project manager in Dallas - who states: "I just get sleepy when I read." Fram comments:"a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify."
This statement intrigues Le Guin and she launches into a critique of the franchise bookselling and publishing industry in the US. Making some valid points. First she provides a little history on reading and book publishing - how reading and writing was never something everyone did - in fact at one time it was a practice done by only the elite or those in power, the vast majority were illiterate. Women at one time could not read and more importantly were not permitted to learn. This is still the case in some Muslim societies. "Reading," Le Quin states, "was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today." In the 1960s there was an upsurge in reading - and in the 1800's people often talked about books on trains the way we talk about tv shows. They'd have conversations about the Old Curiousity Shop by Charles Dickens, wondering if Little Nell was going to cop it, much the same way we might discuss whether Buffy would end up with Spike, or if Sawyer would get killed on Lost. Back then, Le Quin states - "A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it." "The social quality of literature," Le Quinn goes on to state, "is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. (Not sure I completely agree with her on this - everyone I know has finished the bestsellers they've read such as Harry Potter, whether they remember them that well after having done so is whole other issue.) "The Potter boom," she states in the next paragraph, "was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and shared social experience."
"Books," Le Quinn writes, "are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidy of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities."
And here she launches her critique:( Read more... )
In the essay, she discusses two polls, one by the National Endowment of the Arts and one by The Associated Press - which both stated that readership of fictional works has been in a sharp decline. She does question the accuracy of the two polls, stating NEA polled 13,000 adults and stated only 46.7 percent read any book, yet oddly excluded "non-fiction" from "literature" in its polls, "so that you could have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and the entire Letters and Diaries of Virigina Woolf that year and yet be counted as not having read anything of literary value." Proof that polling remains an inaccurate science at best and doesn't tell us very much. But you already figured that out just by watching the New Hampshire primaries. Doesn't stop us from doing it though - that and list making, for some reason.
At any rate, in the AP poll - the AP correspondent, Alan Fram - quotes a telecommunications project manager in Dallas - who states: "I just get sleepy when I read." Fram comments:"a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify."
This statement intrigues Le Guin and she launches into a critique of the franchise bookselling and publishing industry in the US. Making some valid points. First she provides a little history on reading and book publishing - how reading and writing was never something everyone did - in fact at one time it was a practice done by only the elite or those in power, the vast majority were illiterate. Women at one time could not read and more importantly were not permitted to learn. This is still the case in some Muslim societies. "Reading," Le Quin states, "was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today." In the 1960s there was an upsurge in reading - and in the 1800's people often talked about books on trains the way we talk about tv shows. They'd have conversations about the Old Curiousity Shop by Charles Dickens, wondering if Little Nell was going to cop it, much the same way we might discuss whether Buffy would end up with Spike, or if Sawyer would get killed on Lost. Back then, Le Quin states - "A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it." "The social quality of literature," Le Quinn goes on to state, "is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. (Not sure I completely agree with her on this - everyone I know has finished the bestsellers they've read such as Harry Potter, whether they remember them that well after having done so is whole other issue.) "The Potter boom," she states in the next paragraph, "was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and shared social experience."
"Books," Le Quinn writes, "are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidy of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities."
And here she launches her critique:( Read more... )
