Originally published in Etude magazine
Spring 2007

Are books absolutely necessary?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.