“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.” Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
The Great (Literary) Depression
The Inmates Have Taken Over
“Summer morning is risen / and to even it wends / and still I’m in prison / without any friends.” Start your Monday off right with this piece from The Paris Review on John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Speaking of the madhouse, here’s a piece on Anne Sexton and her book Transformations.
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The Cancer of Culture, the Culture of Cancer
Citizen author Claudia Rankine has announced that her next book will be on the culture of cancer. “I’m interested in being in a restaurant and wondering about eating a steak and if it’s hormone-injected and eating it anyway,” she said.
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Decolonizing Our Shelves
“… Stop talking about diversity and start decolonizing our shelves.”At the Winter Institute 2018 (Wi13), keynote speaker Junot Diaz lambasted the publishing industry for talking — but doing little else — about diversity in literature, and implored librarians and booksellers to fill their shelves with diverse books. From our archives: an essay on race, gender, and Diaz’s writing.
Tuesday Links
The LBC has named its next pick. It’s a fantastic, epic, funny book. Visit the blog for all the details.Forbes rounds up the most expensive books sold at auction in 2006. The top ten include five atlases, but according to the slide show that accompanies the story, a Shakespeare First Folio brought in the most: $5.1 million.Darby’s blog turns two and he cleverly uses this fact as an excuse to link to some Swedish librarians.”Which f**king road would you live on?“So sad. A spelling bee training book with typos.
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The Stuff of Fantasy
Attention financial journalists! If you haven’t done a lengthy study of wealth in Game of Thrones, consider yourself less cool than Slate’s own Matt Yglesias.
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“variation in the amount literature”
Perhaps the depression isn’t so much in reading as it is in readable materials?
Not only that, but my inbox is full or “watch this video”s–I’d guess 3-6 hours every day, because talking is faster/easier than typing, and bloggers/marketers think people like seeing faces enough to justify the extra bandwidth/buffering or posting a video rather than an audio.
“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so.”
It’s wrong to fault the afflicted for their suffering, to be sure, but anyone who hasn’t noticed the alarming rate of ADMVDD (advanced disjunctive monosyllabic video-dependent dysphoria), among the young and youngish, must be too busy with Facebook to care. The problem with books being that they’re powered not by ads, or lithium ion batteries or Google… they’re powered by the Reader’s intellect… soooooo…. uh….. yeah. Perfect Storm meet Vicious Circle. Because where is the intellect supposed to come from in the first place… Snapchat?
I sent a two-paragraph email to an under-30 colleague earlier this year and he still jokingly refers to this wild breach of protocol as “War and Peace”. Whereas I can still quite vividly recall a value system in which the longer the letter one received in the post, the happier one was to receive the letter… and we measured length in pages, not paragraphs (or characters). There’s a joke about size in there somewhere…