from The New York Times / November 25, 2007
A Good Mystery: Why We Read
By MOTOKO RICH
PERHAPS the most fantastical story of the year was not “Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows,” but “The Uncommon Reader,” a novella by Alan Bennett that
imagines the queen of England suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in
life.
At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the
forces of MySpace, YouTube and “American Idol,” the notion that someone
could move so quickly from literary indifference to devouring passion seems,
sadly, far-fetched.
The problem was underscored last week when the National Endowment for the
Arts delivered the sobering news that Americans — particularly teenagers and
young adults — are reading less for fun. At the same time, reading scores
among those who read less are declining, and employers are proclaiming
workers deficient in basic reading comprehension skills.
So that’s the bad news. But is all hope gone, or will people still be drawn
to the literary landscape? And what is it, exactly, that turns someone into
a book lover who keeps coming back for more?
There is no empirical answer. If there were, more books would sell as well
as the “Harry Potter” series or “The Da Vinci Code.” The gestation of a
true, committed reader is in some ways a magical process, shaped in part by
external forces but also by a spark within the imagination. Having parents
who read a lot helps, but is no guarantee. Devoted teachers and librarians
can also be influential. But despite the proliferation of book groups and
literary blogs, reading is ultimately a private act. “Why people read what
they read is a great unknown and personal thing,” said Sara Nelson, editor
in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.
In some cases, asking someone to explain why they read is to invite an
elegant rationalization. Junot Díaz, the author of “The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao,” vividly recalls stumbling into a mobile library shortly after
his family emigrated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey when he was 6
years old. He checked out a Richard Scarry picture book, a collection of
19th-century American wilderness paintings and a bowdlerized version of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sign of Four.”
So what about those three titles turned him into someone who is crazy for
books? “I could create a narrative explaining the creation myth of my
reading frenzy,” Mr. Díaz said. “But in some ways it’s just provisional. I
feel like it’s a mystery what makes us vulnerable to certain practices and
not to others.”
Such caveats aside, there are some clues as to what might transform someone
into an enduring reader.
“The Uncommon Reader” posits the theory that the right book at the right
time can ignite a lifelong habit. (For the fictional queen, it’s Nancy
Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love.”) This is a romantic ideal that persists among
many a bibliophile.
“It can be like a drug in a positive way,” said Daniel Goldin, general
manager of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee. “If you get the
book that makes the person fall in love with reading, they want another
one.”
Most often, that experience occurs in childhood. In “The Child That Books
Built,” Francis Spufford, a British journalist and critic, writes of
how “the furze of black marks between ‘The Hobbit’ grew lucid, and released
a dragon,” turning him into “an addict.”
But what makes that one book a trigger for continuous reading? For some,
it’s the discovery that a book’s character is like you, or thinks and feels
like you. In accepting the National Book Award for young people’s literature
for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” earlier this month,
Sherman Alexie thanked Ezra Jack Keats, author of “The Snowy Day,” a classic
picture book. “It was the first time I looked at a book and saw a brown,
black, beige character — a character who resembled me physically and
resembled me spiritually, in all his gorgeous loneliness and splendid
isolation,” Mr. Alexie, a Spokane Indian who grew up on a reservation, told
the audience.
In an interview, Mr. Alexie said “The Snowy Day” transformed him from
someone who read regularly into a true bookhound. “I really think it’s the
age at which you find that book that you really identify with that
determines the rest of your reading life,” Mr. Alexie said. “The younger you
are when you do that, the more likely you’re going to be a serious reader.
It really is about finding yourself in a book.”
Of course that doesn’t account for reading for information, enlightenment or
practical advice. And for others, it’s not so much identification as the
embrace of the Other that draws them into reading. “It’s that excitement of
trying to discover that unknown world,” said Azar Nafisi, the author
of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” the best-selling memoir about a book group
she led in Iran.
Sometimes the world of reading is opened up by a book that goes down easy.
Mr. Bennett said he chose “The Pursuit of Love” for his fictional queen
because it happened to be the first adult novel that he read for pleasure.
He said that for him, as with the queen’s character, the book was a stepping
off point into more heavyweight literature. “There are all sorts of
entrances that you can get into reading by reading what might at first seem
trash,” Mr. Bennett said.
And certain books that become phenomena — like those in the Harry Potter
series or “The Da Vinci Code” or, to a slightly lesser extent most books
recommended for Oprah Winfrey’s book club — can, in tempting people to read
in the first place, create habitual readers. Perhaps more often, however,
those readers just wait for the next “hot” book.
Indeed, even after Ms. Winfrey recommends a title, sales of other books by
the same author don’t necessarily match those of the book that bears her
imprimatur. “What I find with readers today is they don’t go off on their
own to another book,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. “They wait for the next recommendation.”
It may also be that for some, reading is a pursuit that, like ballet or
baseball, simply requires practice. “I think for a lot of people, reading is
just something you do,” said Paula Brehm Heeger, president of the Young
Adult Library Services Association. “And you eventually realize that you
really like it.”
Book sales in general are growing only slightly: According to the Book
Industry Study Group, a publishing trade association, the number of books
sold last year, 3.1 billion, was up just 0.5 percent from a year earlier.
The question of whether reading, or reading books in particular, is
essential is complicated by the fact that part of what draws people to books
can now be found elsewhere — and there is only so much time to consume it
all.
Readers who want to know they are not alone are finding reflections of
themselves in the confessional blogs sprouting across the Internet. And
television shows like “The Sopranos” or “Lost” can satisfy the hunger for
narrative and richly textured characters in a way that only books could in a
previous age.
But books have outlived many death knells, and are likely to keep doing
so. “I’m much more optimistic than I think most people are,” Mr. Díaz said.
Reading suffers, he said, because it has to compete unfairly with movies,
television shows and electronic gadgets whose marketing budgets far outstrip
those of publishers. “Books don’t have billion-dollar publicity behind
them,” Mr. Díaz said. “Given the fact that books don’t have that, they’re
not doing a bad job.”