Yesterday's Paper
A former librarian interviews an author who says books are obsolete.
by Caitlin MacCrae
April 2, 2008
As someone who makes books her hobby and livelihood, I cringed at the idea of helping to elevate the profile of Mikita Brottman's new cultural critique, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. I've spent my life shelving, conserving and binding books. I even worked as a freelance letterpress printer, setting type by hand in the half-millenium-old tradition of Johannes Gutenberg. And here comes Brottman, declaring all those beautiful, dusty, leather-bound volumes less important than the tripe we give an hourly refresh during our workday.
From the time we were old enough to decipher Goodnight Moon without parental assistance, we've been taught that reading books is a lofty pursuit. Now, enthusiasm for that pursuit appears to be waning. The New Yorker recently wrung its hands over a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts that showed less than half of Americans had read a book in the past twelve months — the lowest percentage since the survey was first conducted twenty-five years ago. Yet Brottman, who has a PhD in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, is unconcerned. Despite her own book's title, she doesn't believe people should stop reading. In fact, she says we're reading more than ever — websites, email, text messages, blogs — and that this type of reading is more valuable than an unhappy slog through The Iliad. She spoke to Hooksexup about why the decline of book culture is nothing to mourn, the joy of tabloids and the sex appeal of librarians. — Caitlin MacRae
Since I've worked in books, the subtitle "Against Reading" provoked an instant reaction.
I'd wanted to just call it The Solitary Vice, and the publisher wanted to include "Against Reading". I felt it was kind of a Trojan horse, because it's not really against reading at all.
Right, it's more that it takes issue with the idea that reading books will turn us all into good, upstanding citizens.
Yeah, and that reading has become an unassailable virtue, and you simply can't attack it. That's like saying walking is a virtue, without regard to where you're going or why you're going there.
But you point out that as a culture, we're reading more than ever — just not books.
People assume that if you're not actually sitting with a book in your lap, you're not really reading. Whereas most of what people are doing online is reading. Sending text messages or sitting with a magazine or a comic is reading. There are all kinds of reading, and I think book-boostering campaigns are a reaction against these things that compete for our attention. People feel anxious about the demise of reading, but those anxieties are groundless, and perhaps rooted in snobbery.
It's a very Catholic guilt, this worry about whether we're reading "the right things."
And whether we're getting too much pleasure out of reading, as though if we really enjoy it then we're not learning from it, that it should be a struggle, it should be difficult, and we should just plow on with something even if we're not particularly engaged in it. So many of the people I talked to said they had real difficulty putting a book down even if they were not enjoying it at all.
It's true. For every tabloid I read, I feel the need to balance it by reading a real book.
[Laughs] As though it's going to cancel out the dirt you've put in your mind.
Who's benefiting from this idea that literature is the only valuable thing to read?
People who feel they've struggled with the classics and gained from them and were educated by them. It's a barometer of anxiety. And they have this idea that reading is a communal activity, that it can be done in book clubs, it can be done by everyone in the city reading the same book, it can be a way of bringing people together and out of their isolation. But I think more people have had my experience than otherwise: that reading has isolated them from the community and damaged their social gifts.
What do you mean by social gifts?
In my experience, and in the experience of many of my students, if you're from a family that doesn't read a lot, you can develop a very complex and textured inner language. Your spoken language is more simple and straightforward. When you read these very complex ideas, you can lose the ability to communicate with people around you.
Do you see the rise of memoirs and blogs as a product of people moving toward things that feel more relatable?
Possibly, but I think there's always been an interest in memoir. It's just that now that reading is seen as a virtue in its own right, I think some people feel memoir is the easiest way into that virtue — the easiest thing to write, and the easiest thing to read. It's still sort of a book, and it has all the virtues of a book. It's like a novel without all the scaffolding surrounding it.
One of my favorite parts of your book was about how books themselves have become fetish objects that have little to do with reading. I just moved across the country, and I shipped all my books out here, and when I unpacked them I had this moment of, What am I doing this for?
I think the less we need books, the more people fetishize them, and those people are not necessarily great readers. Everyone seems to believe it's more virtuous and admirable to collect rare editions than to collect teapots or something, but really, it's one kind of fetish or the other.
Do you think there's a growing resentment of being well-read, that it's becoming less of a desirable trait?
Like a backlash? I'm not sure I've noticed that, but I do think it's true now that people tend to judge one another less by their set of collective references than they used to. If I refer to a Shakespeare character and someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'm not going to count that as a strike against them. In the past, there was more of a shared set of references that every Westerner had. It's much more fragmented now. There are so many different cultural frames of reference that there's less elitism, less of a sense that one is superior to the other.
Now I have a question for you. I noticed when I was researching this book that librarians are considered cool and sexy these days. Have you noticed that?
Yeah, actually. When I tell people I was a librarian they're like, "Ooh, tell me what goes on in the stacks." I think it has something to do with, as libraries start to lack usefulness, the librarian becomes seen as a keeper of these sacred book objects. It gives us a certain allure. n° n°
©2008 Caitlin MacRae and hooksexup.com