In the days of the Enlightenment, when few books were published and people read for amusement in their leisure hours, the speed of thought, as expressed in books, could afford to be slow, proceeding from point to point in Augustanly balanced steps… In this century, 150 years later, it seems that our attention span has shortened alarmingly. The average-length novel is too much of a stretch for the time-challenged, multi-tasking, BlackBerry-prodding “entertainment consumer” to contemplate reading, let alone the 700-page biography of VS Naipaul or Edith Wharton. Not because of the size of books, but because of the thought processes they contain. Via Bookninja

Articles on this nature pop-up with frightening regularity. Certainly, as an avid reader, it never fails to shake me when I talk to someone who doesn’t do any pleasure reading. Having spent much of my formative adult years in a world where books are omnipresent and everyone is reading something—not, perhaps for pleasure, but at least they’re reading—gives one a somewhat distorted world-view. Us book people romanticize literature, and why not? When people find something that connects with them, they automatically tend to place it on a pedestal and revere it. It is not a unique phenomenon: sports fans, Deadheads, political activists, and the devoutly religious do the exact same thing. I suspect a lot of the people who fall into the category of book worshippers would cringe at being lumped in the same group as Deadheads. There is a popular image of the avid reader as an intellectual superior, alone and aloof with their nose perpetually in a book. Book people relish the image, while some others see it as a source of mockery.^[1]

What writers like John Walsh seem to forget is that, until fairly recently, literacy was the mark of a certain social elite. If you had the time to read books for pleasure, that meant you didn’t have to use your time for your survival. The majority of people read very little—mostly the Bible, newspapers, almanacs, and so forth. Only after the Industrial Revolution, and a move towards urbanization, public education, and the rise of a middle class did books and pleasure reading become something for the ordinary person. Pleasure reading by ordinary people is more of a 20th Century ideal. That’s not to say that ordinary people in the Enlightenment didn’t read for pleasure—but what they read was far from the same thing as their social superiors. The pleasure reading was not what we know of as Literature with the requisite capital-L, as taught in colleges and sold in ominous, well-bound tomes. It was pop literature, fluff literature, doggerel poems. To put it another way: while some of us read David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon today, most people read Debbie Macomber, Patricia Cornwell, and David Baldacci—mass-market paperbacks that sell in massive numbers, but amount to little. One hundred years from now, it’s more likely that people will be studying Chabon than Baldacci.

Walsh makes a big point of the experience of Sven Birkerts trying to teach Henry James to undergraduates.

They tackled Henry James’s story “Brooksmith”, and hated it. Was it, asked Birkerts, the language, the style, the syntax? All of those, said the students. It turned out they were defeated by everything that James was trying to communicate… The subtle moral distinctions between characters, the importance of their choices in the society through which they moved – it wasn’t just that the students found such things old-fashioned; they couldn’t grasp them at all.”

As a student who had to read Henry James on multiple occasions, and hated every second of it, allow me to articulate this from the other point of view. Part of the problem with reading Henry James work in the 21st century^[2] is that we are in a different world, only loosely connected with James’s. The world, the way people speak and interact, almost the entirety of society has changed, and James’s predilection for overwrought language is alien to anyone who grew up on the simpler, more natural language of contemporary literature. It is not a shortcoming of the students, it is simply an inability for James’s writing to maintain relevancy. I’m not adverse to seeing James taught^[3], but anyone teaching it should be prepared to address the issues of relevancy, and connect the themes to the students experience.

Fortunately, there are some voices in the interviews that follow the article that have a much firmer grasp on history, and a saner view of how technology will affect the written word. Sue Thomas, a new media lecturer summarizes it best: “I feel quite cynical about the cloak of preciousness that’s been woven around the novel: it’s such a recent medium – we’ve only had it a few hundred years and yet you often hear people say, ‘We’ve always had novels.’ No we have not!” Literature is an ever-changing thing. As it time continues, it will change form, it will change style, and it will change audience. There will always be the book person, the avid reader looking for the challenge of a 1000 page behemoth novel, whether new or old. There also will always be the ordinary person who picks up a Harlequin Romance novel to read in the waiting room, or on the plane, and there is not a great deal of overlap between the two.^[4]

1. Any chronic reader with a sense of humor should watch “Time Enough at Last”, at least once. It is a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” starring Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a bookworm who catches flack from his wife and his boss for his chronic reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and anything with words on it. It is a habit that ends up saving his life, but the twist ending will make you weep. ↩
2. Or reading it in 1994, when Birkets study was published ↩
3. I’m just adverse to reading it ↩
4. Though there is overlap. A professor in my final semester at Temple University, Dr. Sue Im-Lee, who taught Contemporary American Fiction confided to us that she loves Harlequin Romance novels during a section on Donald Barthelme. ↩

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

I have nothing to say at this point.

You don’t have to appreciate tennis to appreciate DFW’s writing on it.^[1]

1. And for god’s sake, do not skip the footnotes. ↩

Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.

This was never my cup of tea to begin with. Still, there will always be a market for stories of heartbreak and lost love… I hope.^[1]

1. No, of course this has nothing to do with my in-progress novel. Of course not. No, I did not just kick my notes into the fire. ↩