This Just In: Television is Ruining America

Especially big, flat-screen televisions hanging on walls in the wilds west of Boston.

Apparently the hottest new trend in book-related writing is to proclaim, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth, the ongoing decline in American interest in reading of all kinds. The Boston Globe ran an article last weekend which, predictably, cites the aforementioned How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read as evidence of this trend. (I think it's evidence of a different kind of trend.) What I find interesting, though, is that the author's impetus for coming to this realization was the fact that she got stuck in Worcester, Massachusetts, without a book, and was feeling mocked by the gigantic flat-screen in her hotel room. (Worcester! Horrors! It's so backward it's practically the deep South! It's too bad there aren't nine colleges within the city itself - a city so devoid of intellectual life would never have any bookstores. In fact, my education - received as it was in the even vaster, emptier wasteland surrounding that city - was conducted entirely through the use of cave paintings, until I miraculously woke up one day at college and fully literate, in the author's fair city of Cambridge.) Our heroine found herself stranded in Worcester in the middle of a snowstorm, which might make bookstore-visiting difficult, but she's acting like she's been set adrift in the middle of the South Pacific on a shipping pallet, when her destination was a college campus in a major New England city. So, her hopelessness, not to mention her melodramatic handwringing at the awfulness of the giant TV - which: it's one night of your life, lady, get a grip - is not by any stretch of the imagination justified under the circumstances.

Furthermore, if you set out on such a drive, in the middle of a snowstorm which has been vociferously predicted for days and days, and you are a self-professed advocate of reading, what on earth are you doing leaving the house without a book? You cannot possibly tell me that you expected not to get stuck - something like a foot of snow was predicted (and fell) that night, and any idiot ought to know that a bad storm in Boston is almost without fail a worse one in Worcester. I don't go anywhere without a book in my purse, just like I don't go anywhere without a blanket and a roadside emergency kit in the car. "Bookless in Worcester." Shut it, lady. She takes her smugly superior dismay at being bookless in the City of Seven Hills (yes, and shut up, and bonus points if you can name any seven hills in Worcester) into what might be called a review of a collection of interviews from The Paris Review, in which various writers talk about writing and literature and reading, if it did anything more than cite with approbation authors who think reading is on its way out (Faulkner) and patronizingly deride authors who express some optimism regarding the intellectual curiosity of the human race (Issac Bashevis Singer). This is after a couple of nasty asides about books that aren't intended to be read, like a collection of pulp crime novels. (What did you expect them to be like, lady? They're pulp fiction. I'm not sure it's possible to read them, like, unironically, which she seems to have been trying to do.)

The NEA's numbers are more or less undisputed, at this point, I guess. Reading, and interest in reading, is on the decline. Harry Potter, and The DaVinci Code, and His Dark Materials and their attendant movie adaptations notwithstanding, Americans are more interested in the TV and the internet than they are in literature, apparently. But I see plenty of people on the bus and the train reading every morning; maybe they're just reading the Metro, or Boston NOW, but they're reading. Not everybody wants to read Proust, you know? Some people want to read for fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. Reading is hard to multi-task. It requires a hand and both eyes, really - it's not something you can do while driving, or cooking, or talking on the phone, or checking your email, or giving your kid a bath. It takes time and quiet in a way that's becoming increasingly rare in modern life. But I don't feel a sense of despair about it. People who are going to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read are the kind of people who weren't going to read the books anyway, you know?