Reading is Fundamental and Heading for a Crisis

I was in a thrift store yesterday, scouting for the bookstore, and the guy ringing me up said, “I wonder if books will ever go away.” I replied that its doubtful. As much as they can be, books are our permanent repository for information. And, once books are sent off into the world, that information is truly decentralized and difficult for authorities of any kind to control. That is the strength of analog.

Digital, which the clerk was worried about, centralizes information, at least as information flows today. While there are many raw sources of information (and mis/disinformation), as well as opinion, we access those sources through a few number of portals. You are reading this through Substack, which now has a functioning monopoly on newsletters and hosting short and longform writing. For a few years, I did my last newsletter through an email service, handling promotion and fundraising myself. The numbers of new readers stagnated as that service got “old” and “unsexy.” Before that I used another forum and jumped from that when it became passe and readership stalled. My readership is up via Substack, but that’s because they own the newsletter market. Point is Substack is the only viable game in town…for now.

And it’s not just Substack.  As much as the competition tries to upend things, Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter, and YouTube dominate their mediums. There are alternatives, but none of them deliver you information direct. Everything goes through a middleman, a middleman which organizes and controls the flow of information.

I write something and put it on Facebook and their algorithm pulls key words and decides if it is worth exposing to a lot of people, some people, or no people. Certain subjects get buried. Use a certain word and no one sees what you wrote. Put a link in the main post and fewer people see it. Put a link in the comments and more people see the original post, but the link doesn’t show up when you share the post. Certain pictures will drive or stall engagement. And, if the algorithm doesn’t like what it found – no matter how tame or if it is permitted – your post gets buried or removed, and your account can be sanctioned or locked, and there is no way to find out why whatever is happening. Forget appealing things because by the time Facebook responds – if they respond – whatever suspension they slapped on you is over. I didn’t create this system and I have no control over it, but to use Facebook, I have to abide by it.

While other social media sites work similarly, all have ground rules and algorithms that determine what you see (and often the ground rules and algorithms are in conflict). For a creator, that is a problem. We either have to tailor our stuff to adhere to known and unknown rules, chance sanction, or not use social media. Unfortunately, not using social media to disseminate or promote your work means that, if you don’t already have a platform, few people will see it. And even then, all this can go away in an instant.

If someone kicks the proverbial plug out of the wall, online digital content is gone. We don’t need to imagine what happens if Zuckerberg wakes up and decides that he’s through with Facebook and Instagram to see what happens when a fickle Tech Lord decides to change things up. Elon Musk has shown what centralized control of a social media platform means. His dealings with Xwitter should give pause to anyone who assumes that the internet means free expression or that what digital offers is permanent. The great A.J. Liebling wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” I’d add to that, “Access to publication is guaranteed only to those who own access.”

Fortunately, there are enough people who know all of the above to keep decentralized analog culture alive, even if at the margins. What concerns me about books is what digital and dumbing-down has done to readers, or potential readers.

Junot Diaz and The Atlantic report on students starting college and rebelling over the idea that they have to read a whole book, something that they were not asked to do in high school. Many are frightened by the prospect of reading something “so big,” as if the difficulty of wordage and density of ideas increases as a book’s page count grows (any Sarah Maas tome should smash that illusion). Because they have been assigned excerpts, articles, and short essays – as well as audio books and video – they feel most comfortable and safest with what medium is the shortest and least challenging. Teachers, frustrated with having to strong arm kids into reading, take the path of least resistance and surrender to excerpts, articles, and short essays, as well as the non-printed. And those teachers that inherit a-literate kids are handed a near impossible situation.

But I don’t want to lay this only or mostly on teachers. The modern American education system is not designed to promote book reading. The rise of standardize testing, partially as a result of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, means that teachers teach for the test, which necessitates substituting short form for long. This is especially true of teachers who are evaluated by their students’ end of year, standardized test scores. You want to keep your job, make sure that those scores are up. You want higher scores, shelve those books and teach to the test. Your job security relies on dumbing your students down.

Sidelining books for the short form doesn’t just prevent kids from familiarizing themselves with books and conquering the fear of reading, it helps decrease their attention span, which makes book reading even more of a challenge. By the time college comes around, many students lack the ability to focus on a book or even long chapters. Throw them in front of screens and make fast-paced media the bulk of their consumption and the attention span problem gets worse.

And all of this is compounded by parents who either don’t have the time to teach their kids reading at each stage of development and monitor what goes on with their kids at school, especially their high schoolers. Some parents don’t have the will to engage with their kid and reading. Some suffer from the same limitations as their children (for much the same reasons).

Of course, parents who have the education and resources to attend to their children’s literacy, for these folks things are much different. If you have the time to spend with your child on reading, especially when they are young, and/or can afford private schools that emphasize academics and/or can pony up for tutors, well, your kid has a very good chance to become a very good reader.

Let this go on without pause or correction and we wind up with a society in which the children of means read books and the middle and under classes do not. The children of means become independent thinkers who access decentralized information. The rest are reliant on what they are told and whatever information that they a fed by middlemen through their portals. Children of means enter college having read books and are not scared to engage in literature. Everyone else struggles to get through easy reads like Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and are deprived useful thoughts. Eventually, society is divided between the educated haves and the illiterate have nots, as it was for the bulk of human history (and still is in some parts of the world).

This doesn’t have to be. There’s a fix and it is not difficult. It is free and most of us can do it. Start with reading to your child when they are still dribblers. Surround them with books – board books, cloth books, even adult books that can be abused – so that they experience books as just another thing around the house, as non-threatening as a soft toy or rubber ball.

Starting from year one, for every birthday and on holidays, make sure that at least one of your kid’s present is a book (if you are a childless aunt or uncle, you can do the same). Write a note in the book so that the book is personalized, something important, of sentimental value that the kid will hold onto and cherish. Make a special shelf for your kids books and create a fun ritual around shelving a new book.

Spend time in the library, for sure, but also make a monthly trip to the local bookstore one of the fun things you do. Once a month, as a kid, my mom and I would have “date night.” We’d go to Tower Books on Watt Ave, where we’d wander the stacks until I found a book I wanted. Then we’d go to Marie Callender Pies and she’d buy me a slice or two. For seven-year-old me, it was the Best Night Ever. I got pie, I got a book, and I got to hang out in an “adult place” that wasn’t a bar. It not only fed my love of books (and pie), but it demystified the bookstore while not stripping it of its magic or fun.

Things get harder once a kid enters their teens, but if you have created a foundation, you can build on it. As a teen, I didn’t care much for literature, aside for Lord of the Rings, but I was obsessed with music. So, my mom turned me onto music and entertainment biographies like Lady Sings the Blues. For a school book report I read Ladies & Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce, a book selection which shocked my teacher and made me the only 12-year-old in school who knew what Dilaudid was. My mom also got me a subscription to Rolling Stone. I’d go straight to the music coverage (which was shitty) but wound up reading Hunter S. Thompson and other Rolling Stone writers. From there, I picked up Creem and punk zines and Maximum RocknRoll (MRR).

MRR not only turned me onto radical politics (something I was interested in but didn’t have access to), it gave me my first regular writing forum. In issue two, MRR issued a call for scene reporters, and so I sent them a scene report. They ran it in issue three. For the next couple years, I sent in regular scene reports and the occasional interview. I started doing my own fanzine, Spamm, the first to come out of Sacto’s early 80s hardcore scene. Later, I wrote a monthly column for MRR, my first regular writing gig. And so it goes…

During all this, I read books. I still read books. I have several going at once, big ones, little ones, easy ones, hard ones, fun ones, boring ones. I average more than one a week. Right now, I am reading the New Oxford Annotated Bible, a book on the history of Italian food, and a biography of John Jacob Niles. I’ve got a fat stack of books next to my bed and more piled in the living room. I love books and I love books because I was taught to love books by my book-loving mother.

That’s where it starts. Right at home with you and your child (or niece/nephew, grandkid, etc.). It is low tech, it is cheap, it is easy. It just takes time, insight, patience, engagement, and will. And, if you are thinking, “Geez, I haven’t picked up a book in ages,” that’s fine. Don’t feel guilty. We don’t live in a culture that values books. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find a book or books that you like, books that will help start a reading habit.

Trust me on this. I am a professional bookseller. I deal with a lot of people who want to start reading again but don’t know where to begin. The answer is: Ask a reader. Ask a librarian. Ask a bookseller. Tell them what you’ve liked to read in the past or what movies you like or areas of interest.

You like jazz and interesting/intense biographies? Check out Art and Laurie Pepper’s Straight Life. If the size is a bit daunting, try Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues. Enjoy soccer and fucked up stuff, Among the Thugs by Bill Bruford is a must read. Food and fucked up stuff, try Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. For those of you on a true crime kick, I recommend Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Sacramento? All of you need to read Joan Didion’s “Notes of a Native Daughter” and everything else she wrote. Need a laugh? David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day will do the job. Not sick of political campaigns? Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is essential. Or if you just want entertaining insanity, read Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas followed by Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Acosta was Thompson’s partner on Vegas). Best book I’ve read recently? Claire Dederer’s Monsters, on enjoying great art by bad people. You need more? Just ask.