There has been a lot of discussion all over the place about the NBCC's big petition drive to save the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's book review section. The importance of print book reviews in general to our culture has become the cause at the NBCC and there have been spinoff columns and blog posts all over the place about why newspaper book review sections must be saved.
I've already discussed the internet vs print conflict that came out of this, but there's something else that occurred to me today as I was reading a bizarre piece on the subject in the Orlando Sentinel (which is the newspaper the Mom and Stepdad read everyday btw). Here's how Kathleen Parker opens her column to save book reviewing:
People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read. They like to carry the words around with them -- tote them on vacation, take them on train rides and then, most heavenly of all, to bed.
They're also a dying breed. And newspapers, apparent signatories to a suicide pact, are playing "Taps."
What a twit. And her editor, who approved this column (titled "America's Death March Toward Illiteracy") is a twit as well. People who read books are smarter than those who do not? So people who just read newspapers or magazines are stupid? Does she really mean this? And what about people who don't have time to read books - the ones who are working so hard fixing cars, repairing electrical grids and - I don't know - designing the next space shuttle? If you read technical manuals that are not reviewed in a newspaper are you stupid compared to folks who spend their evenings reading literary fiction?
We are in a world now where we make blanket statements that book people are smart people?
I mean really - this is who we have championing the cause of book reviews? We need to have a book review section so the smart people can find out more titles that will make them smarter? I thought the whole thing could not possibly be any more elitest until I heard the lady call in from Scottsdale, AZ today on NPR and tell NBCC president John Freeman that she would die without the NYT's Sunday Book Review. She lives, she said, "in an intellectual wasteland". One wonders how she knew enough to find NPR on her radio. Amazing how they still have it out in the sticks.
Poor sad smart lady, with all those hicks.
Look, I'm fine with book reviews in newspapers - honestly my problem with newpapers for the past few years has involved their collective inability to pursue hard stories concerning the Iraq War, not if Thomas Pynchon is getting his 800th review. Yes, book reviewing is great and good and I'm all for positive discussion of books. But is newspaper book review coverage really what's keeping America literate? Is this the cause that must be embraced and written about by the country's top critics and all those earnest authors who are posting at the NBCC?
Is this the big important battle we should be paying attention to?
No. Not by a long shot.
Why aren't we all up in arms about public libraries? We read the stories about Jackson County, Oregon and feel bad - but those libraries closed anyway last month and now it's up to the residents to raise the money on their own to get them open again. And as for the Gulf Coast - do I even need to remind everyone what a mess the Gulf Coast library systems are still in? Twenty libraries in Louisiana alone are still closed from Katrina - still closed 18 months later. Has the NBCC been rallying the troops to speed up the process to get those buildings rebuilt, repaired and reopened?
What about funding for emergency book mobiles? What about increasing the hours in school libraries for the communities to use? I don't know - what about coming up with ideas to help the community get more access to books? And what about the poor kids who spend time in the juvenile justice system in the city of New Orleans? Not a library to be found in those detention centers - except the ones that volunteers are putting together on their own.
Why aren't there letter writing campaings in support of libraries across America? Shouldn't there be at least a bookmobile in every rural community and inner city neighborhood? Shouldn't we be striving to make sure every Headstart Program has a library, every Girls and Boys Club? Why is the literary community more concerned about reviewing books then making sure that books get to the people who have the lowest access to them? On NPR John Freeman made a point of saying that while lit blogs are a good thing, not everyone has a computer. He suggested that newspapers are the choice of the people who can't get to computers (can't afford them basically). So I guess newspaper book reviewers are apparently reviewing for the "masses". But if you can't get the damn books then what does the review matter?
I grew up in a house without a lot of money. I honestly can't remember if we got the local newspaper when I was young but I do remember the bookmobile coming by when I was very small (under 5) and going to the library a couple of years later. We went to the library all the time when I was growing up - every week. Between my parents (who both loved to read) the Eau Gallie Public Library (which looks nothing like it did when I was a kid) and the Creel Elementary School library I became a lifelong book lover. I chose books based on recommendations from the librarians, from posters and signs they put up on the walls, from recommendations from family and friends (Little Women from my Aunt Irene, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from my grandmother) and from pulling them off the shelves. The library was the only way I was going to get all the books I wanted - the only shot my family had at reading to our heart's content.
We got along just fine without newspaper book reviews; I don't know what we would have done without unlimited free access to books.
I do enjoy a good book review and I wish there was money enough to support their inclusion in every major newspaper in America. But I know - I know - that they are not the center of American literacy or the lynchpin upon which our culture is built. That's the public library system, and that is where the battle for the books should be fought.
May 2
2007
06:41 AM
"People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read. They like to carry the words around with them -- tote them on vacation, take them on train rides and then, most heavenly of all, to bed."
I am so glad you posted this quote! I encountered it yesterday, but lost it.
There are all kinds of wrong here, but I just have to mention that there are many book readers out there (myself included) who don't find "reading" per se to be a sensual experience. I'm a much more rational person, than sensual and prefer to "think" about books and words than smell them or take them to bed, god forbid. Yuck.
As far as the "we are smarter" for reading...I wonder how the readers of the Orlando Sentinel will respond?