It has become the prevailing opinion that people are not reading books with the same zeal, energy and enthusiasm as in bygone years. They could be right, although I cannot understand how people can live a rich, wise and fruitful life without reading works of the imagination. My own life would be bereft without my dedication to reading.
Books have been my life, both as a writer and a reader. I am well aware that younger generations seemed to have eschewed reading, surrendering instead to the lure of other distractions, of which there are many. I’m not sure this is true and I do not explore statistical analysis to prove the point.
I can only judge the joy of reading by my own experience. Nor can I pinpoint how reading became my passion. Perhaps it was because my mother was a passionate reader of popular novels. Between her domestic chores, she would tuck herself away on a living room easy chair and read those novels which she got from the lending libraries that were a staple of life in those days, where for pennies a day you could read books borrowed from a store in the neighborhood without going to the public library which was a longer distance from our modest Brooklyn apartment.
From the age of eight or nine, I haunted the Stone Avenue Children’s Library in Brownsville, about a mile from our home and I can remember arguing with my older cousins on the literary merits of my choices. To me such adventure series as Bomba the Jungle Boy, The Boy Allies, The Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift were the epitome of literature.
It was only years later that I learned that these books were created in a writing factory founded by a man named Stratemeyer who had a stable of writers who ground out these books according to strict guidelines. It didn’t matter to me. I loved them.
I suppose I graduated upward to Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and those three great books by Nordhoff and Hall, which began with Mutiny on the Bounty and, if I remember, ended with Pitcairn’s Island. I’m sure, given the time, I could name a hundred others. But it was somewhere around age sixteen or seventeen with the sap rising that I began to seriously widen my range. There was nothing, nothing to compare with my discovery of those great writers who gave joy, solace, insight, wisdom and meaning to my youth. They thrilled me and are permanently engraved in my memory.
Many are out of fashion today and that is a pity, although I seriously believe some will be resurrected and once again revered. Some still are although it may not be fashionable to admit it.
I love the short stories and novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos. John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham and numerous others. In college my European novel class at NYU under the brilliant tutelage of Dean Ranney brought me the joys of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Stendhal, Victor Hugo and numerous others. Many still resonate and have morphed into the popular culture in another incarnation. Les Miz is a good example.
And no literary education could ever be complete without the novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, Austin and the Brontës and later ones like those of George Orwell, Doris Lessing and countless others. Indeed, if one hasn’t read Orwell’s Coming Up for Air or Lessing’s The Fifth Child one has missed a blast of glorious insight and two great stories.
It pains me to hear that some of my favorites are not considered in the top rank of great writers in the eyes of the so-called literary establishment. As one who does not believe in literary cliques and fashion, I can still root for the resurrection of the passionate novels of Thomas Wolfe, (not Tom), the great short stories and novels of John O’Hara and Somerset Maugham. Indeed, who, but the most elitist literary snobs, can dispute the wonders of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Stick around long enough and they will make a well-deserved comeback. At least, I hope so.
Call me an ingrate for clinging to such nostalgic hero worship and toting up my own list for grand literary achievements. Oddly, I feel somewhat sad for those who have not partaken of those wonderful writers. In my day, most of my peers had read those works and we could discuss them for hours on end. Today getting even any book discussion going is rare, except perhaps in the formal setting of a book group. In my day a book discussion was a common staple of conversation.
I don’t much care what the so-called literary establishment thinks and champions. The writers I have cited thrilled me and still do. Some time has anointed as classics. Others are waiting their turn. Indeed I have learned to trust my own judgment in what I read and what I write and to hell with the prevailing opinion of others. Not all. Merely most.
Indeed being anointed a literary heavy is often transitory. As proof name ten winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. Stumped? Try five. Do the same for the Pulitzer, then the Booker. This does not mean that I don’t love the novels of my contemporaries. Philip Roth comes to mind.
Reading is a deeply personal experience and reading works of the imagination is one of the great joys of a fulfilled life. If people eschew reading, they impoverish themselves.
Mr. Adler is the author of 30 books including novels such as 
June 23rd, 2010 at 10:30 pm
Mr. Adler,
I would respectfully say that I disagree with the presumption that youth have simply “given up” on reading. I would rebut to that point the enormous success of, for instance, the Harry Potter series.
This tells me that, when quality writing comes forward, new and exciting, it can bring a book vast audiences.
What I would say is that a glimpse at a typical bookstore, conversely, brings to mind just why a lot of youth have not continued the patronage in other books that Rowling’s series has. Row after row of painfully derivative dreck, rack after rack of titles that are blisteringly bad, achingly boring, and completely without merit.
And these are all books that made it through the disturbingly painful gauntlet of traditional publishing!
I will say that it is the industry that has failed our youth, and not our youth having failed our industry.
June 24th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
As a child my favourite books were fantasy, followed by the Trixie Belden books, and from there….pretty much anything that took my fancy.
I have two children (18 and 20) and the younger is a voracious reader in the holidays. It is nothing to come back form the library with 6 books. I always have a book or two on the go, so the example has always been there.
My other child is more a techno buff and prefers the internet. My husband seldom ever reads a book, he prefers reports and newspapers.
Children these days have more alternative forms of entertainment (X Box, playstation, computer games, etc) so I would believe there is LESS reading today than 25 years ago, but I think this is something that is learned: if the parents read a lot, there is a higher chance the children will. They learn by observation.
I enjoyed this post, Warren. Thank you!
Regards
Robyn M Speed
(PS, I am a writer also, still pushing to get published, currently in an international competition in which the prize is a publishing contract with Hampton Roads Publishing)
July 8th, 2010 at 8:48 am
My children were bought up reading The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories and The Harry Potter book series. Now it seems the e-book era is the latest craze and it might cause many book stores to close. Reading books online isn’t the same as buying a hardcover to keep track of your expanding book collection.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Amazingly Amazon just put out a press release on Kindle’s success. I didn’t think we would arrive at this point so quickly but apparently e-book(Kindle book) sales at amazon are outselling hard-cover books.
From their release:
“In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”
– and –
# Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
# Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
Kid K,
Jackson WY