Take a hike, Gideons

• Salman Rushdie is choosing the reading material at hotels in Manhattan.

Why has this taken so long to start happening? The whole Bible-in-the-hotel-room thing is kinda 19th century, don't you think?

Rushdie is the chairman of this year's PEN festival, which is being held at the hotel and other venues around the city and brings together more than 100 writers from 40 nations.

The British-Indian author's list includes mostly well-known literary classics, including Leaves of Grass, the 19th-century poetry collection by Walt Whitman, and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. The most recent work is 2000's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of only four writers on the list who are still alive today.

Guests wanting to read one of Rushdie's novels, which include the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children, will have to bring their own copies.

It's not all bad

• A new survey reports that library usage is highest with patrons aged 18-30.

Mostly they're coming to use the computers, but still:

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said.

Exploding a trend piece

• At The Smart Set, J. M. Tyree takes apart the notion of "death of literature" pieces.

Equal parts on-the-nose and highly arguable; overall a very worthwhile read. On the nose:

The “death of print,” the “death of literature,” the “death of books,” and the death of reading culture — the death of irony, and now the death of the short story — nothing dies more quickly than the “death of” article...

Great novels and short stories separate us from our fellow human beings, temporarily. They might leave us better equipped to imagine their suffering upon our return. But during the experience, we’re disengaged, sometimes mute. In that sense, serious fiction seems diametrically opposed to the kinds of imaginary communities, games, interactions, and buzzing, surfing, and chatting experiences available online. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster once wrote, but the how and why of connecting online seems categorically different from how fiction works. That quality of all-consuming solitary readerly absorption — what Birkerts champions as “depth” — is essentially humane and its evaporation is alarming. For many the plug-in required to run serious fiction gets disused or was never installed at the factory to begin with because the developers considered it a fancy and unnecessary optional extra. But the real question is whether the Internet and other new digital platforms are more of the same assault begun by movies, television, cable, and computer games, or whether, after serious fiction writing reaches its nadir, it can re-infiltrate the culture using a combination of books, the Web, and wireless screens. Call me, Ishmael — or, better yet, text me — when the answer emerges, because I don’t pretend to know.

Highly arguable:

No pessimism of any sort can be admitted in the cheerful propaganda dispensed by the Glee Club of technology boosters who claim they’re going to save literature using Web sites, blogs, POD publishing, National Novel Writing Month, podcasts, iPhones, e-books, and the like. According to the gurus of the interweb, the cultural changeover from print to digital is supposed to usher in a golden tomorrow of universal democratic access. Sony, Amazon, and Google are the latest contenders in new e-book schemes that most people thought died a whimpering backroom death in the 1990s. HarperCollins is touting browsable free samples of books for the iPhone, starting with Ray Bradbury. Amazon is starting a fiction contest with Penguin, featuring online submissions to be judged by Amazon’s top citizen-soldier book reviewers. And from this day forward until the last instant of recorded time, every Harlequin Romance — hundreds of titles a year — will be downloadable from the privacy of one’s home.

The short fiction writer’s reaction to most of this stuff is probably “Ugh.” Students and business travelers, who can ditch armloads of books and read from a palm-sized device, will probably rejoice over the new e-books. These devices make the skin of most writers crawl. Many if not most serious fiction writers still think of digital media as a threat rather than an opportunity. The online world, especially for the older crowd, is still conventionally depicted as a kind of South Bank of London filled with the literary equivalent of bear-baiting.

A big leap, methinks, hence the "probably" in the first sentence of paragraph #2 to soften the claim. Somehow I doubt "serious" fiction writers look at e-books as a threat; I think what Tyree refers to elsewhere in his essay as "the human need for a story and a storyteller" will supersede any quibbles about how it's delivered. People seek out stories to make sense of the world, in whatever form, and all these various forms of new media are just new wrinkles, new ways to bring clarity to all the madness. Reading, for some, is like faith is for others; it doesn't matter how you do it, just that you're doing it. Anything beyond that is to your own benefit. Probably.

Either read or don't

• Lennard Davis extols the advantages of not actually reading books you nonetheless talk about at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For some reason, a book called How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard, has people all atwitter:

An all too predictable moralism surrounds the reading of books. There is a prescribed way of reading: one page at a time, starting from the front of the book to the back, paying close attention to every single page in order, no skipping around. But the reality is that most of us graze — read a bit, put the book down, start up again. We may pay more attention to one part than another, skim boring parts, and even (heaven forfend) leap over long, dull tracts. Some very strange people even admit to reading the end of a book before the beginning, which is sort of like eating dessert before dinner.

But let's remember that even one of the greatest readers of literature, Samuel Johnson, admitted that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." In fact, Johnson seemed to have made quite a career of not reading. He once lamented to his friend Mrs. Thrale, "Alas, Madam! How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page." And reacting to advice that once started, a book should be read all the way through, he opined, "A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"

I know I don't read like this -- I am a serial monogamist when it comes to books, one at a time, please -- nor do I know many readin' folks who do, so Davis' huge generalization in the first graph can be immediately ignored. Well, most of the essay can, for that matter. It looks like Davis pulled some quotes from Bartlett's to window-dress an extremely weak topic in time to make a deadline.

Look, folks, it's pretty simple. Either you've read the book, or you haven't. If you've read it, your opinion about it, whatever it is, is valid. If you haven't, then it isn't. That's all.

See the title of this blog

• Tom Lutz details the history of the "how to read" genre at Salon.

I don't want to stir up the dying embers of the theory wars or the culture wars, but why do Prose and Bloom open their guides with attacks against these mythical creatures? Bloom has them organizing into "covens" of gender and sexuality and multiculturalism. These boogeymen and boogeywomen and boogeytransgenderedpeople have destroyed reading, Bloom argues, by destroying irony, and "the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures." Itself sorely lacking in irony, this kind of talk sets up a dire narrative in which what Bloom calls "the restoration of reading" is needed, not just because literature is worth saving, but because civilization is at stake. This is a somewhat whorish old story, pressed into all kinds of service over the last century and more, not always to the most savory ends.

To save civilization, Prose and Bloom turn to that New Critical mantra any seasoned reader first heard in English lit 101: "the text itself." The phrase is one that all the most crotchety English professors have used over the last 30 years to counterattack the critical rabble like me and my old pals who dethroned the old guard with our malevolent theories. The conceit that Prose and Bloom share is that these new kids (however grayed at this point) are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind.

Read memos, not Macdonald

• Bruce Reed dubs Gov. Dubyah "The Bookworm" at Slate.

Make of this what you will:

Instead of spending the sixth year of his presidency globe-trotting to solve the mess in Iraq or poring over options memos on how to address middle-class families' economic concerns, Bush seems to have dedicated every waking, nontreadmill moment to one cause: reading books.

Two months ago, Ken Walsh of U.S. News reported that Bush had already read a staggering 60 books in 2006. Quick reads like Albert Camus's The Stranger and three plays by Shakespeare drew most of the scorn, but plenty of weighty doorstoppers made the list as well.

Admittedly, the list itself is suspect. The same U.S. News article suggesting that Bush was on a two-book-a-week pace marveled that "the commander in chief delved into three volumes in August alone."

But if the list is for real, it's evidence of presidential dereliction of duty and perhaps an outright threat to national security. Two books a week is an uphill battle for a graduate student whose responsibilities don't even include showering. For a president, who lives at work, reading and comprehending two serious books a month takes a Herculean effort.

60 books so far this year? George W. Bush?

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

All governments lie -- at this point I take this for granted -- and yet every so often, I'm stunned afresh at the things they ask us to believe...

Fidelity

• Joe Queenan confesses all about the number of books he reads simultaneously in The New York Times.

With books (and other such relationships in my life), I am a serial monogamist. I'm loath to read more than one at a time, and rarely have; if I'm liking what I'm reading, I finish it. It's also rare for me to bail out on a book before I finish it, although it does happen, because some books just don't ring my bell at all. (I tried to get into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a little while back and quit about halfway through; short as it was, it was still like watching paint dry.) Someone was looking at my bookshelf recently and asked me if I'd read all of it, and my breakdown went about like this: 60% I've read the entirety of, 20% I've read enough of to get the gist, and 20% I've yet to dive into. I collect 'em faster than I can read 'em, but that probably makes me just like every other book lover out there.

• Joseph Epstein examines the friendships between intellectuals in Commentary.

I've always been fascinated by the relationships between artists, in particular; it's like watching rival gang leaders of equal power playing a cagey chess match. Friendships between creative/intellectual types tend to be short and intense, and Epstein gets into some interesting territory:

How many intellectual friendships dissolve over conflicts of opinion and ideas cannot be known, but the number is probably at least as great as those that fall apart through such normal perils as insults (intended or not) or wounds resulting from pride, ingratitude, feelings of abandonment, or misunderstanding. Nor are intellectuals immune from the riskiest of all maneuvers in a friendship: the effort to reshape the ideas and even the character of one’s friend in one’s own image.

...With intellectuals as with anybody else, jealousy is one of the ways that friendship can sadly resemble love. It is not uncommon for two close friends to resent a third person who may seem to be coming between them—or for that third party to resent a close friendship that appears to shut him out, and to seek means of retribution. The novelist Paul Theroux, for example, blamed the breakup of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul on the latter’s marriage to a woman regarded by Theroux as aggressive and interfering. Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998) was the vengeful and vitriolic result—a risible and finally unsuccessful attempt to reduce Naipaul by mocking his pretensions and highlighting his cold-bloodedness.

Theroux may possibly fall into another category—that of the person who, having no real talent for friendship himself, looks to others as ostensible friends in order to be let down by them. “He was inordinately vain and and cantankerous,” wrote Max Beerbohm about the painter James Whistler. “Enemies, as he had wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to have valued friendship . . . as just the needful foundation for future enmity. Quarreling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life blithely."

For love or money

• "Thomas H. Benton" rhapsodizes on what made him want to be an English professor at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A wonderful essay. "Benton" (a pseudonym) talks about what drove his desire to work with language and the humanities, coming up with a lot of details and thoughts that are awfully familar:

There was a strong material component to English; it wasn't just about words or ideas. I associated literature with the feelings of fall — the vague sadness of the end of summer, the crisp air, sweaters and wood smoke, stained glass and Gothic architecture, and the optimism that comes with new books and stationery. All of those associations took place in an institutional setting apart from teachers, though teachers were necessary because they made demands and offered their experience.

...In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: "So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?" I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives:

• Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.
• Feelings of alienation from one's peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for a sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.
• A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.
• A "geeky" attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas.
• Contact with inspirational teachers who recognized and affirmed one's special gifts in reading and writing, often combined with negative experiences in other subjects like math and chemistry.
• A transference of spiritual longings — perhaps cultivated in a strict religious upbringing — toward more secular literary forms that inspired "transcendence."
• A fascination with history or science that is not grounded in a desire for rigorous data collection or strict interpretive methodologies.
• A desire for freedom and independence from authority figures; a love for the free play of ideas. English includes everything, and all approaches are welcome, they believe.
• A recognition of mortality combined with a desire to live fully, to have multiple lives through the mediation of literary works.
• A desire to express oneself through language and, in so doing, to make a bid for immortality.
• A love for the beauty of words and ideas, often expressed in a desire to read out loud and perform the text.
• An attraction to the cultural aura of being a creative artist, sometimes linked to aristocratic and bohemian notions of the good life.
• A desire for wisdom, an understanding of the big picture rather than the details that obsess specialists.

To all this, check, check, check. Couldn't have said it better myself. I've been tempted to pursue a career in academia, to go off to grad school and take this idea all the way, but something has always held me back, perhaps because, like the professor says, I fear that I would lose my love of it all, and forget why I'd tried to pursue it in the first place.

Embarassment of riches

Two great recent finds:

• Robert Birnbaum's author interviews at Identity Theory.

A great literary website with more author interviews you can stick a shake at, the newest being a chitchat with Susan Orlean:

RB: Do you have any fears about people stopping reading?

SO: No. That seems like it is never-ending—the form might keep changing in terms of how things are delivered but what you are talking about is basic human impulse to communicate. I just don't see how you could assume that would go away. And people will always, there will be people who will want to be communicated to and people who want to do the communicating. Whatever the form is, who knows?

• Don Swaim's audio interviews at Wired for Books.

Audio interviews with authors originally broadcast by CBS Radio in the 1980s and 90s. Swaim is a remarkably fluid interviewer and can switch gears and keep the conversation flowing with just about anyone. If you ever wanted to know what your favorite writer sounds like, here's your chance. John Barth speaks in long, elaborate sentences just like the college professor he is; Joyce Carol Oates often seems not to know exactly how to explain what she does; and two Stanley Elkin interviews reveal a slightly cantankerous individual (surprise, surprise).

Street lit, Voltaire's letters, and recommendations

• Brendan Koerner introduces the whiteys to street lit at Slate.

First it was "chick lit," then it was "lad lit," and now here comes "street lit," here exemplified by an admittedly entertaining-sounding tome called Candy Licker, the author going by the nom de plume Noire (of course). This is oh so much marketing crap, these "[fill-in-the-blank] lit" categorizations, evidence of advertisers trying to create trends where none actually exist, and it's disheartening to see advertising approaches for books focusing on narrower and narrower markets. Nevertheless, solicitations aside, they'll still end up being subjected to the same test as every other piece of writing: is it any good?

• A Russian art dealer has purchased the correspondence of Voltaire and Catherine the Great.

Thomas Bompard, a manuscript expert at Sotheby's in Paris who looked after the archive, said: "Voltaire and Catherine never met, but the relationship between these great characters of the 18th century was conducted through these letters." The most telling comments in the letter for today's Russia refer to Catherine's governing style. Mr Bompard said Voltaire, who lambasted the French monarchy during the Enlightenment for its excesses, approved of her role as an "enlightened despot". Catherine, who ruled Russia for three decades until her death in 1796, viewed herself a patron of the arts and liberty, and a "philosopher on the throne", but has been criticised for the little she did for the millions of peasants in her empire.

Ah, well. At least we still have Candide to remember him by.

• A website can help you decide What Should I Read Next?

This is similar to the recommendations offered by Amazon and Netflix, in that the site tailors its recommendations to you based on the ratings you assign to what you've read in the past. It's not exactly comprehensive; I entered the book I'm reading now (The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin) and came up with a recommendation for a Doctor Who book, which isn't quite to my taste. Then I entered Gravity's Rainbow and came up with recommendations for books by William Least Heat-Moon, Erich Maria Remarque, William Gaddis and others, some of which I've actually read, too, so it's not a total wash. You can also take a "What have I read?" test that will help refine your recommendations; it's a pretty fun way for a book lover to kill some time.