Shifting Baselines

Can you stay awake for a book? Or are books going extinct along with the American attention span?

According to Ursula Le Guin (notable sci-fi and fantasy author now age 78) in February's issue of Harper's, the Associated Press ran a poll and announced last August that 27% of respondents had spent the year bookless. Le Guin is less indignant about the fact that more than a quarter of Americans didn't read a book than that the tone of the AP piece was one of complacency--the author admitting that getting sleepy while reading was "a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify."

But Le Guin believes the sleepy can go ahead and sleep. Books are here to stay.

It's just not that all that many people ever read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

And with that cheeky tone, she goes on to squash the corporate mentality of book peddling and brainlessness of trying to fit books into an business model of selling simple entertainment.

Le Guin starts by discussing how through most of human history, most people could not read. In fact, reading was reserved for the powerful (and that meant men). In some societies today, women are still prohibited from reading. Le Guin sees a "high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to 1950--call it the century of the book--the high point from which the doomsayers see us declinding." She goes on to write:

To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural kowledge 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 so and not fall asleep doing it.

Corporation-owned publishing companies fail to see books as social experiences but simply as commodities. Le Guin believes that corporate takeovers changed the world of publishing, which was previously happy with supply meeting demand. "How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?" (Unsurprisingly, Le Guin then discusses Michael Pollan.) They cannot. And the model that supports that kind of thinking cannot also support the "complex and extremely efficient" book (or its writer).

Within the corporate whales are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house--editors and such anachronisms---people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers.

The whales are falling asleep but Le Guin isn't too worried. Books are different than TV and so are the people reading them.

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.

BOOKS: You all ready for this? Apparently not. Beautiful books in a Paris library from Candida Hofer's aptly named book Libraries. Click on the photograph for more awe-inspiring visuals.