Sunday, April 15, 2007

Why Books?

Things aren't looking good.

Book sales are down, down, down. Book review coverage in magazines and newspaper is down. More and more books are being written, put on the front shelves of the stores for a month or two, shuffled to the back, then returned to the publishers for eventual pulping.

Is anyone reading out there?

I've been trying to do my part. Recently when I was going my taxes, I added up all my receipts for book purchases last year, and, well, it was a lot. And these aren't from used bookstores, either. I make it a point to buy new. So much for books bought.

But as for the number of books I've read recently, that number is going down. With everything I have going on in my life these days, with teaching, with writing my own work, with trying to find time for my partner, for my friends, for the gym, for my soul, I've been finding that reading books has been working its way to the bottom of my list of things to do. These days, if I pick up a book and it doesn't demand my attention pretty quickly, I'll think of almost any excuse not to go on reading it. These excuses include watching Golden Girls re-runs and playing solitaire on my mini iPod.

Maybe books have outlived their usefulness as a cultural object. Maybe with all the phone calls and emails and Internet sites there are to check and return and write, taking the time to wall off the world with the covers of a book doesn't make sense anymore. I recently saw an interview with Philip Roth in which he predicted the novel would be dead within fifteen years.

Still, I can't help hoping he's wrong. Another way to see things is that we're living in a time of transition, in which we're trying to figure out how to live in this bravest of brave new worlds. When the dust settles, maybe we'll find our lives somewhat emptier than we would like. And then we'll turn back to books, just as we've turned away from them recently, to look for a way into our souls.

This isn't just Pollyanna talk. I've seen evidence of it in my own life. A student of mine recently gave me a copy of a wonderful story called "Boys" by Rick Moody. I was in the middle of a thousand other things, but the words of that story forced me to stop what I was doing, sit down, and pay close attention. "Listen to me," it whispered. "Shut out the rest and just listen to me for a little while." So that's what I did.