Do Books Matter?

Dumpster view: downsizing for our 2020 move
involved jettisoning Faulkner and more

Do books matter anymore? Does anyone bother to read? Or are we in a post-literate age where picking up a book is, as the French say, de trop?

I placed a book on hold at the local Barnes & Noble during the Memorial Day weekend, and upon retrieving it, was shocked to notice how few other volumes were on the reserve shelf for other customers. The store itself was barely populated. These observations aligned with my perception that reading is in a death spiral and my conviction that we are dumber and coarser than ever before.

At the help desk, I asked a clerk if there was a table of summer reading suggestions as there has been since time immemorial. Perusing these recommendations was always a delight. I explained that I liked to spend the summer months filling in gaps in my exposure to the classics. She looked rattled and told me there was no such section. She did not lean in to offer me any suggestions of her own. 

Bookselling used to be a noble profession that in its own way helped shape culture. I once knew a colorful local bookseller who was a revered tastemaker and antecedent of today’s influencers. He put books on the map here in Cleveland, a book town and a tried-and-true stop on national author tours. Now the apogee of influencers’ influence is to promote video games and donuts, while bookstore customer service is reduced to looking up requests on a computer. 

Discouraged, I checked out a report from the National Endowment for the Arts, which asserts that “less than half of the adult American population now reads literature.” 

This is not meant to be a preachy post telling anyone to read for the good of it. But I will wax nostalgic about a time when books mattered and were buzzed about like today’s gleaming cultural phenomena -- the finale of Succession or the aggressively idiotic new Barbie film. People used to talk about books at parties, swimming pools, and at the water cooler. There was a vigorous, elevated, appreciative cultural conversation, and to be a part of it, one had to read.

Early in my career, I was employed as a book and magazine publicist. This kind of work, while primarily a marketing function, also launched authors and topics into a national conversation. 

One of my indelible memories of this time was a tense limo ride with literary lion Gore Vidal, who fumed and spewed venom because David Letterman had asked him to explain who he was to the TV audience. This relegation of a former A-list author to second-class status was, in retrospect, a foreshadowing. 

Today, I am hard-pressed to name the last author to create a national conversation. Michelle Obama? Prince Harry? Howard Stern? It's not the same. If you can think of one, please tell me in the comments below.

In ancient times, talk show hosts like Dick Cavett and even Merv Griffin had authors on to discuss their latest works, whereas today’s idea of a televised exchange of ideas is an analysis of the latest Real Housewives episode on Watch What Happens Live.

We have one former president who comes up with an annual summer reading list and another who -- let’s just say -- is no great intellectual.

I admit that I struggle to read books at the rate I once did. My attention span is diminished, and I have less patience to let a novel seep into my pores and build its case. It took me two tries to get into Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan’s Candy House, a literary novel about AI technology that creates a collective consciousness. 

My search for reading pleasure feels increasingly elusive, disjointed, and even anachronistic. This post does not even consider the crushing effects of AI -- I will be tackling that in the near future. But for now, I find it harder to read and for my reading to matter when it seems like nobody else is doing it and our culture is saying books don't matter as much as the latest viral TikTok videos -- tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying -- well, you know.