Are Books Absolutely Necessary?
This essay was originally published in Etude magazine, Spring 2007.
Here is a statistic that will make you gasp, or wince, or just break down and cry: One-third of Americans with college or graduate school degrees did not read a single (non work-related) book last year. Not one book. That’s a sixty percent increase in educated nonreaders in the past twenty years.
It’s no surprise what these non-readers are doing. They are playing online and video games, watching YouTube, blogging, chatting in cyberspace, channel surfing. I get it. I mean, I don’t get why IMing with even the most fascinatingly salacious avatar is more compelling than reading just about any sentence that Joan Didion has ever written, but I get that people are otherwise occupied. 
But here’s the disconnect – or the series of disconnects: As the percentage of people who read books has declined (precipitously) in all categories (young, old and in between, white, Black and Hispanic, men and women, educated and not), the number of book titles published in the U.S. has soared. Last year, almost 200,000 new books were published, up almost 50,000 from just a few years ago. And, while readers have declined, retail space devoted to selling the books they aren’t reading has soared (courtesy of the Barnes and Noble, and Borders explosions). Then, of course, there’s all the online retail space that makes book buying just a click away.
So, let me get this straight: More books. More places to buy books.
Quicker, more convenient access to book-buying than ever. Fewer
readers. Oh, and one more fact to chew on: The number of
self-declared “creative writers” has skyrocketed. More writers. Fewer
readers. It is little wonder that eight out of every ten books
published in the U.S. lose money. The leaky vessel that is the
commercial publishing industry stays afloat courtesy of Stephen King,
Danielle Steele, The DaVinci Code, Joy of Cooking and the St. James
Bible.
I am left dazed and confused, asking myself (and everyone around me who
is not busy IMing or playing WoW) if this is the end of Western
Civilization. (Not to mention the end of my career.) Suppose the
numbers keep going the way they’re going. Suppose in ten years, half
of educated people don’t read; in twenty years, two-thirds, and so on,
until reading a book becomes as uncommon as, say, sitting through Der
Ring des Nibelungen, or flossing twice a day. If hardly anyone reads,
would that be so terrible?
I want to convince myself that we are not, as my grandma used to say,
going to hell in a handbasket. And so, I reason that, on one level,
reading a book is just a pastime, a hobby, a pleasant way to spend a
rainy afternoon. Suppose that afternoon was spent not with book in
hand but rather with mouse or remote in hand. Big deal. It’s hard to
get all apocalyptic about that. On another level, reading a book is a
pretty decent way to learn about people, places, events, issues and
low-fat cuisine. But with Google searching 350 zillion sites in less
time than it takes to turn the page of a book, with Wikipedia on top of
the culture as it evolves, with blogs commenting daily, even hourly,
who needs to wait two years for a book to make it from inside the
author’s head to the Borders new releases table.
Ah, but reading a book is not just a way to while away a few hours and
not just a method of gleaning information, it is an act of engagement.
Books, good ones, can simultaneously tweak emotion and intellect. They
can make us feel and think, dream and imagine. A book can transport a
reader back and forward in time, across continents and oceans (and
galaxies), and deep inside psyches. If we continue down the path of
becoming a nation of nonreaders, do we miss out on these extraordinary
experiences? I would like to say yes! because I am a life-long,
utterly committed bibliophile who cannot imagine a life without books,
but the fact is, nonreaders who encounter other art forms – a piece of
music, for example, or a painting – might experience this same sense of
engagement, this same swelling of the spirit and quickening of mind.
So here I am, making the case that books are not absolutely necessary,
that the frightening statistics about our growing national aversion to
reading are not all that frightening, that civilization will not, in
fact, come tumbling down around our ears if very few of us read books.
And yet, I remain unconvinced by my own arguments – and I hope you do
too
…because there is something else going on with books, with, not to be
too precious about it, The Book. The Book is a unique cultural
artifact. It is creativity and imagination, analysis and synthesis,
wit, insight, sensitivity, perception, ingenuity and epiphany -- and
you get to hold it in your hands. You get to own it. You get to sink
into it any time you want. Wow. Obviously I am not talking about Thin
Thighs in Thirty Days or Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul. But
neither am I limiting my admiration to Shakespeare or Pliny the Elder
(I hear the Younger was no slouch either). Inspiration- and
epiphany-wise, these guys are great. But I am a reader and writer of
modern narrative nonfiction. My touchstones are books like A River
Runs Through It and The Year of Magical Thinking. These are the
nuanced, textured, deeply experienced, wisely told tales to which I
resonate. And it is precisely these characteristics – nuance, texture,
wisdom – that I believe make books necessary, essential and
irreplaceable.
I don’t know how to reverse the statistics, how to make book lovers out
of the one-third of us who don’t read. But I do think that the
two-thirds of us who still do read ought to stay the course despite the
cultural storms and the cyber Sirens singing to us from the rocks.
It’s up to us two-thirds to read more, to join or form book clubs, to
support our libraries, to keep independent booksellers alive, and to
keep good writers gainfully employed.
Lauren Kessler is the author of five works of narrative nonfiction, including the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club -- which David Letterman, in fierce competition with Oprah, chose as the first (and only) book for the Dave Letterman Book Club. Kessler appeared twice on his late-night show. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, Utne Reader, The Nation, newsweek.com and salon.com. She is a national speaker and workshop leader. The founder and editor of Etude, the online magazine of narrative nonfiction, she directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her writer husband, Tom Hager, her three brilliant and faultless children and a cat that thinks it’s a dog.
Her website is http://www.laurenkessler.com
