I recently had the great joy of reading Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader. A celebration of the uncommon reading experience, which surely must not be so uncommon. For isn’t it many a reader who has learned how one book leads to another, how books can rip the world open wide, and how reading indeed is like a muscle? But then this might just be the company I keep. Those kind people who care to befriend a girl with obsessive compulsive reading habits who spends the rest of her time writing stories and then writing blog posts all about the reading.
For we are apparently rather uncommon, me and the company I keep. Britons aren’t reading, Canadians read less than Americans (as noted in the Descant blog a couple of weeks ago). Alan Thicke’s not into books. Also via the Quill and Quire blog, I’m told (and by Steve Jobs no less), that, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception [of the Amazon Kindle] is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.â€
I would argue indeed that the conception of the Kindle is flawed, from top to bottom, but the rest is codswallop. The polls are just wrong, Alan Thicke is an idiot, and Steve Jobs must get out less than I do. Because I’ve been getting out lately and looking around to find that readers are everywhere. That reading is just as common as its ever been, and in a time and place in which “Books” is graffiti, can anything be so dire?
Ridden public transport lately Steve? Have you noticed all the people reading? And they’re reading books, you know, many of them. Which means that when these people left their houses this morning, packing a book in their bag was as essential as putting on shoes. Did you know that reading on transit is so exasperatingly common that in Toronto we’ve even got a blog devoted to it?
Sure there are probably too many reading Jodi Picoult, The Secret or The Da Vinci Code, and I do remember last summer when everybody and his brother had a copy of the new H. Potter. But let us not get into technicalities now. To more people than to others, a book is a book is a book.
And now, let us pretend that a bookstore is a bookstore. Which we all know isn’t actually true, for there are Bookstores and they’re called Independents, but that’s another story for another day. But today, just for now (economics aside), imagine the Big Box bookstore. Those of us who boycott have a variety of reasons for doing so, but the people who venture inside are really only after books. Maybe they’re not bothered about the politics, or the Big Box is the only game in town. But in my experience these stores are often crowded, and never so much in the scented candle aisles as in the places where books are. For it seems that people still like to browse books, touch them, thumb through them, and yes, even buy them (discounted or otherwise).
Have you been listening Steve? And I mean really listening, to conversations. Because people are talking about books. And yes, sometimes they’re talking about Tuesdays With Morrie, but we shall not be discriminatory. Today a book is a book. Though it was only yesterday when I overheard two people spend twenty minutes passionately debating the book versus the film version of The Kite Runner. It was this morning when a stranger in the elevator sang the praises of the title in my hand— The Gathering, which she’d just read, adored, and she promised that I’d like it too. Last month when I was reading Guns Germs and Steel I was interrupted every quarter of an hour by people I’d never seen before who wanted me to know that they’d read it, they’d loved it. And these were individuals who didn’t look bookish in the slightest.
The library near my house is always crowded. The Toronto Public Library system is said to be “thriving”. And yes, modern libraries are about much more than books, but whenever I go there, it’s always three deep in the checkout line. Further, the children’s area is perpetually crowded, with kids for whom coming to select new reads is a weekly ritual, just like it was for me when I was little. When the book spines were golden and the chairs were all small.
And speaking of crowds, have you ever seen what happens to those boxes of free books out front of houses, Steve? You know, when residents are moving, or clearing space, and the books go out in a cardboard box, and at once the swarms descend. They really do. I’m not saying all the books get taken, but free books draw individuals from far and wide. The crappy paperbacks or outdated textbooks might get left behind, but the box will be rummaged through, for within every box there’s the chance of a treasure.
Nearly every middle-aged woman I know is in a book club. Reading is sexy. I want to look like The Bookslut. “What are you reading” starts good conversations. As I type this my husband is beside me reading The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. On the weekend we walked past a man in a cafe who looked exactly like Salman Rushdie, and then halfway down the street a girl walked by with her nose stuck in Midnight’s Children.
Reading is everywhere. It’s not the company I keep, and I don’t think it’s just because I live in a city. Reading is so widespread that those of us particularly passionate do so like to kvetch that the masses are doing it wrong, but right or wrong, they’re doing it. Go outside and see: a book is a book, and everywhere I turn, someone is reading one somewhere.