Consuming Books

I forgot about this essay. This made it into my portfolio along with Daniel Suelo, Jdimytai Damour, and the Price of Our Souls and The Island of Pineapples and Fucking. 



I'm seventeen years old and sobbing down the hallway of Marquette Senior High School. I walk quickly, my head down to obscure my red eyes from view. I think about puppies, kittens, balloons, anything to try and quench the flow of tears. My sociology teacher Mary Stevenson, looks alarmed.

“Maria, what's wrong?” She asks.

“I-I just finished this book,” I say holding up the offending culprit.

“The Little Prince?” She frowns.

In one breath I launch into a retelling, “Uh-huh. You see he's in love with his rose, but he's too young to understand what that means, and he finally realizes it might be too late because a goat may have eaten her because he didn't draw a muzzle on it.”

To Mrs. Stevenson's credit, she listens compassionately and sends me to the bathroom to collect myself. I had fallen deeply in love with The Little Prince. The story moved me to tears, unfortunately for me, in the middle of the school day. It would not be the only book I loved. My teen years brought me Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Three Musketeers, Lolita, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Great Gatsby, Barney's Version, Whale Music, I Was a Teenage Fairy, and many other books that enlightened and entertained me. To this day I will frequently devour a book in a single evening given I have three or four hours free. I am a reader.

The public school system would mark me as a success, but they have had little to no impact on my love of reading. Phonics confused me. I taught myself to read at age seven after years of tedious special ed teachers telling me to “sound it out.” I excelled within a year from easy readers to books incoming freshmen in college might be required to read. The books they gave me bored me. I wish I had a quarter for every time a teacher told me to stop reading and pay attention to the film version of a book. Readers are not made in school.

While a prolific reader, I cannot sing. Despite years of violin and voice lessons I am not even remotely passable as a musician. It is not because I hate music or have not been given significant opportunity to explore music. I simply have no innate talent in harmony, pitch, cords, or melody. Singers, even non-professional ones are not made either. Yet no one is calling it a crisis that Americans cannot sing passably. I am also innately terrible at mathematics, gymnastics, and team sports. I can work an algebra problem; I could probably solve a reverse proof (at gun point), but I don't care for it. Since high school, I have endeavored to have as little contact with story problems as possible. If a high school or college graduate feels the same way about reading for leisure, who am I to judge?

Ursala LeGuin tackles this issue spectacularly in her article “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”. She proposes that corporations have turned books into commodities and commodities need a market. This reading crisis is nothing more than a blame and shame campaign to sell books. Books marketed to the masses have two things in common: they do not contain words an eight year old cannot understand and they are left open ended for sequels. Eventually the most formulaic bestseller ceases to sell. Then what? Guilt people into reading them. Are you Raising a Reader? What was the name of the last book you read?

I work in a library. It sounds odd to tell my coworkers to stop pushing literacy so hard. Indeed all people should be able to read, and if a person can be persuaded to take up reading for leisure, that is great but it's not mandatory. Glass blowing is a dying art, too, but they are not actively recruiting on a national level. Of course a glass blower would love for other people to take up glass blowing. Of course, as a library employee I am delighted that people are reading but what if Leguin is right and the push to read more, and read anything, is a corporate ploy? Would it not be better to have a smaller library filled with higher quality books? The kind of books that make teen girls cry in class and do not make people stare at the cover, unsure if they have read this particular adventure of Jack Action And the Adventure of ____________.

In many ways, the Harry Potter series changed literature, although unlike Leguin, I prefer to see this as mostly positive. Harry's magic world did entice non-readers to read and read a lot. The series spans over 1,000 pages. Rather than see this for what it is, a miracle (or perhaps the Potter naysayers were right and something literally possessed Rowling to write this book), every publishing house wanted their own Potter series and their own J.K Rowling. Publishing houses dropped less successful, more literary works in an attempt to re-create Harry Potter in the most sterile way possible. Rather than marvel at what Harry was, marketers are scrutinizing why this or that new book isn't Harry. While Leguin may have been sarcastic, what happens if there was a release party for a poorly written soon-to-be bestseller and nobody came? What if we take profit out of publishing? What if reading were a choice?