Sorry: the state of reading is quite simply never as bad as people make it out to be. If it were, would there be the constant deafening roar of a million hysterical readers telling us we aren’t reading as much as we used to?
And just what sort of reading do we mean here, or wherever we’re stirring up a literary moral panic? Plenty of people who never pick up a newspaper or sprawling nonfiction book are reading acutely written political and cultural commentary online every day. If, as I suspect, fiction is what we talk about when we talk about the death of reading, then the worry is even more unfounded: don’t ever start giving a shit about how other people choose to entertain themselves. I’m not about to argue that Twilight isn’t intellectually bankrupt, but we may want to remember that back in Cervantes’ day, all contemporary fiction was considered escapist, hollow and ultimately dangerous trash by those who weren’t on the bandwagon. Don Quixote himself is an association of absurd fantasies and the feeble-mindedness that allows them to prosper.
Except, of course, the vividness of our errant knight’s hallucinations belie an intensely focused cognitive power that undercuts the notion of reader as unwitting prey. What self-righteous readers hate most about the latest Bad Popular Book, be it by Dan Brown or Danielle Steel, is the level of engagement its fans have with the material, their ability to fully enter a world. I think we long to experience the undeniable rapture and ecstasy of purpose evidenced by midnight book releases and awkward attempts and fan fiction. We talk about such things as though they are somehow beneath us, because we know we will never feel about Joyce and O’Connor and other Important Literature the way these devotees feel about their idols. We relish distance and resist real intimacy or fixation at all costs. And though critical detachment may allow us to mitigate some bias only important in matters of cold evaluation, it keeps us from truly losing ourselves in that rare place which is half the author’s making and half our own.
