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This Week:
- The State of Reading
- Places & Culture
- Dialogue: Being in Iraq
- Weekly Digest
I'M NOT SURE who started the rumor—it may have been Sam Goldwyn or, more probably, Marshall McLuhan—but somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, people came to believe that books were doomed. The future belonged to film and television, it was assumed, the prevailing media in an increasingly visual age: Queen Victoria read books, but we will watch video screens.
It didn't exactly turn out that way. The book lives.
So begins Brian Murray's review in The Weekly Standard of Clive Bloom's new book Bestsellers. Indeed, the state of publishing today, now that the wild-eyed e-book prophecies have died down and massive publishing houses continue to disgorge books like Pez tablets from a toy dispenser, inspires a sense of Dickensian ambivalence: It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Print is no longer the "supreme expressive form" in a multimedia culture, Bloom says, and yet never have books been "consumed by a greater number of people who speak and read English … at any other time in history."
So the demise of reading, as you can imagine Mark Twain would observe, has been greatly exaggerated. For those who forever forecast its doom, reality checks are in order in four areas—books, where one critic says seekers of "serious reading" just need to know where to look; magazines, where "highbrow" is enjoying a renaissance; newspapers, where the future isn't necessarily worse than the present; and literature scholarship, which one columnist says has done more damage to itself that a "lowbrow" culture possibly could.
• BOOKS: The January dismissal of Ann Godoff from Random House was lamented as the latest sign of the decline of "serious" and "highbrow" publishing by the literati, says Benjamin Schwarz in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Op-eds in the New York Times waxed apocalyptic: "Publishing is now driven wholly by the search for blockbuster books and blockbuster profits," said one. (Now?) "The chill runs through the corridors of all large publishing houses and into the home offices of thousands of serious writers," said another. These wailings would have more credibility, Schwarz observes, if "serious" writers weren't ignoring so many "serious" titles.
Book snobs decried the literary clout of Oprah Winfrey—but why aren't they lamenting the influence of the Times, which, while spotlighting the execrable Memoirs, overlooked two recent, far more worthy nonfiction titles, Nicholas Orme's Medieval Children and Mark A. Noll's America's God (a history of American Protestantism), which were in turn ignored by the cultural elite that bemoans the sorry state of serious book publishing?
(Evidently the "cultural elite" also ignored Books & Culture's cover story on Noll's book in January.) As the Atlantic's book editor, Schwarz says he's "astonished that so much literary fiction and what can only be described as decidedly noncommercial nonfiction issues from an industry supposedly obsessed with the bottom line."
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/04/noteworthy.htm
Also:
Slate founder Michael Kinsley says the problem isn't too few good books; it's too many—so many he can only skim and guess in his role as National Book Awards panelist:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2074427
As for Oprah's bemoaned literary clout, she's now become an influential missionary for the classics:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12190-2003Feb27.html
• MAGAZINES: After September 11, the types of successful magazines seemed to bifurcate—those, like upstart US Weekly, that sugar up their audience with celebrities and other cotton candy, and those, like the resurgent 145-year-old Atlantic Monthly, that bring an intellectual perspective to the serious business of world events. Indeed, while US Weekly was the fastest-growing magazine in the last six months of 2002, with a 55.2 percent rise in newsstand sales, it was trailed closely by the Atlantic, which sold 52.4 percent more copies (thanks in part to William Langewiesche's magnum opus "American Ground"), according to David Carr in The New York Times. The New Republic and Harper's also saw a spike in newsstand sales. But magazines that try to straddle this line between "blatantly escapist and loaded with gravitas," as Carr put it, took a hit—Time and Newsweek sales were down more than 30 percent.
- Abstract of Carr's article here
- Read a transcript of NPR's interview with Carr about this story
Also:
Columbia Journalism Review on the Atlantic, which CJR calls "one of the few American magazines that still dares to publish high-quality, complex narratives."
http://www.cjr.org/year/02/6/sherman.asp
CJR on the state of magazine writing:
http://www.cjr.org/year/02/6/index.asp
Note: The Atlantic suffered a tragedy last week when Michael Kelly was killed while covering the war in Iraq. Kelly was editor-at-large and former editor of the Atlantic and a columnist for the Washington Post. The prayers of Books & Culture are with Kelly's family and colleagues.
The Post's Howard Kurtz on reaction to Kelly's death
Statement from the Atlantic Monthly
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