A while back, Cindy linked to the Harper’s Magazine archive abstract of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading.” Has anyone read this article? I meant to try and find it online, forgot about it, and then was happy to chance across it when browsing my library’s latest hard copy of Harper’s. Very serendipitous!
Le Guin opened with a paragraph about the 2004 NEA survey which found that 43 percent of Americans polled hadn’t read a book all year; in 2007 the Associated Press ran their own study and found that 27 percent of Americans “had spent the year bookless.” It is after relating these findings that Le Guin offers her own conclusion: “But I also want to question the assumption—rather gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”
Le Guin continues to trace broad trends in literacy in the world, and sees the high point of reading in the U.S. during the century from 1850 to 1950, largely due to the rise of public schooling and the establishment of libraries; then she talks about books as “social vectors,” about which people want to talk (the need to read a bestseller, she argues, is “not a literary need. It is a social need”).
She also covers publishing as a business, and the difficulty of treating books like standardizable and interchangeable commodities. At least one of her conclusions is that, while some types of publishing can be somewhat predictable and profitable (she mentions the textbook industry and how-to books), “some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.”
In short, she covers a lot of ground, and she covers it in a succinct six-page essay. And she does it very stylishly; I hit the end of the essay before it felt like I’d been reading even for a minute. My purpose here is not to murder Le Guin’s prose by trying to summarize it, although I fear that’s what I’ve done. My real purpose is to entice you to read the article (if you haven’t yet), and to tell us what you think of it (if you have). Everyone’s busy and we don’t always get the chance to read the literature about literature (or RA, or librarianship, or publishing trends, or technology; even the list of subjects about which we should be reading gets long!), but when we do, we should have a place to talk about it.
I join Cindy in her original assessment; she said “I just love opinionated older women who speak their minds.” I agree. I also think books are here to stay. But I don’t think I am as optimistic as Le Guin is about the big picture. I tend to agree more with Jonathan Franzen, who wrote in his essay collection How To Be Alone: “For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images—a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers—feels apocalyptic.”
I worry that there are too many other entertainment choices that are simply and immediately easier, and lend themselves more to social needs than reading (Nintendo Wii comes to mind, not that there’s anything wrong with it). I worry that kids, just like adults, have less time to stumble across books on their own. I also worry about the format of books, because they are the only thing in my life that I always and immediately still know how to work (open, flip pages) and where I don’t have to worry about correct versions, a power source, and non-crashing software, but that’s a whole other issue.
But the important question about this article remains. What do YOU think about it?
