Written by: Goemagog

We don't like to read.

I was a voracious reader when I was young. Now, I only read King and Rowling, and King's been getting pretty weak lately.

What has contributed to the drop-off, then? "All the other alternatives that compete for your time," says Schroeder.

No. If that were true, Harry Potter author Rowling wouldn't have sold so many books. People make time to read what's worth reading.

Fewer than half (47 percent) of U.S. adults now read fiction, down seven percentage points from 10 years ago. "That's especially sad," says Schoeder. "Literature is a culture's DNA. But the good news is that non-fiction has held up better. Serious books, especially political works, have been moving off the shelves."

In the world of political books, people rarely read what they don't already agree with. It does not broaden minds or lift spirits.

The problem with reading is you can only read what's been written, and most of what's written isn't worth reading. Given the multitude of entertainment and information venues available to us, very little of it is original or of quality.

The last sci-fi show with some originality went to hell after the second season, with speech-making taking priority over stories. How many angsty teens do we really need on our televisions? How many afterschool or Lifetime specials telling us that something is bad are we expecting to sit through? People want entertained, Hollywood generates billions of dollars for the countries they'll actually film in. The computer game industry is even larger. We have more television channels than stuff to put on them. Why wouldn't someone want to get away with a good book?

They've already read it. In books and magazines, there's a shortage of quality. Very few people want to read Ulysses, and nobody out of grade school wants to read Dick and Jane. What's left? Harlequin and ... well... King and Rowling. Clancy reads like a technical manual, Grisham writes about lawyers, and then we pretty much run out of people worth reading. There are a lot of other authors, but as with B-5, I'll go to a church if I want preached at or flip through my high school yearbooks if I want to reminisce about teen angst.

For originality of story line and plot devices, science fiction and fantasy are the two genres that offer the most potential, because they're not tied to reality. Once reality is disposed of, anything can happen or be justified. I haven't seen a new idea in science fiction televisionsince the original Star Trek. New names for old gizmos. Newer sci-fi shows replace gizmo-based stories with soap opera angst (usually with a teen or two, i.e. Deep Space 90210). Movies offer some, but for sci-fi books, it's all about the angst, the drama, the hero overcoming the inner demon that any sensible sidekick would have beat out of him in the first chapter.

Fantasy has come to us in three stages. Pre-tolkien has simple stories, usually with a moral, and only a few types of creatures. Tolkien put everything into his stories that he could find a way to fit in. Post-tolkien fantasy has everything the author can squeeze in, just like Tolkien's work, but a hero with an inner demon that any sensible sidekick would have beat out of him in the first chapter... sound familiar? Read up a paragraph.

Sometimes there is an original idea, but that's rarely enough for more than a short story. Far too often these are stretched into novels or, even worse, a series. Angst is padding, not plot, unless it's Harlequin, in which case angst is the whole story.


Rowling's fantasy series has angst, but that's fluff to pad out the story, and hasn't thusfar been the story. King has monsters (and who doesn't like monsters?) but his characters all have voices in their heads. Rowling writes for what used to be called "young adults". Young characters dealing with adult (not sexual) themes. She's the only person that I know of that writes for that market since Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys.

Better books will bring readers. Rowling has proven that. People aren't too busy to read. Rowling has proven that. The problem isn't that there's only one Rowling, it's that publishers print too many angsty pretentious books with hero's that annoy more than they inspire. What's the point in escapism if their world is as fucked up as ours?

Goe, thinks the thunderstorm passed.