I found a few articles online that relate to this, including "Why We Don't Read," "Why Most Americans Don't Read," and "Reflections on Why Americans Don't Read."

I also found "Who Cares If Johnny Can't Read? The value of books is overstated" and this--the American Literature Abuse Society (ALAS) ("Literature Abuse: American's Hidden Affliction. Once a relatively rare disorder, Literature Abuse [or "readaholism"] has risen to crisis levels due to the accessibility of higher education and increased college enrollment since the end of the Second World War. The number of literature abusers is currently at record levels. Causes of Problem Reading: Excessive reading during pregnancy is the major cause of prenatal LA among the children of heavy readers. Known as Fetal Fiction Syndrome, it leaves its tiny victims prone to a lifetime of nearsightedness, daydreaming and emotional instability...," etc.).

In the course of all this though I found an unexpectedly encouraging piece--"The world's most overrated bookstores"--in which Slate's copy chief June Thomas pooh-poohs the famous UK book town Hay-on-Wye ("a town of 'greengrocers who happen to sell books' because that's what people come for--a shocking contrast with most used-bookstore owners, bibliophiles who simply can't stop themselves from buying and selling books"--emphasis mine; I'm glad to know I fit the stereotype). She conceded, though, that "...you have to admire the marketing genius that lures a million visitors a year to a relatively remote town of 2,500... Richard Booth, an eccentric Hay-on-Wye bookseller with a talent for self-promotion, hatched the idea of the book town 40 years ago; since then several others have sprung up in Europe, Asia, and North America. It can be a godsend for an isolated community where shop fronts and storage warehouses are cheap and plentiful."

So I'm on the right track, anyway. We just need to get the Chamber of Commerce involved.
12:34:15 PM    comment []  trackback []  

Creepy dreams all night. And my body was so cold. Maybe I should stop with the tofu and go back to having hot flashes. But I woke up at 1:30, as I said, and wrestled a bit with the moonlight, and then I sat up and read (by lamplight) until 3 and then went back to sleep again. I'm studying yet another book on how to write a surefire book proposal. This one's pretty good--Making the Perfect Pitch (Katherine Sands, ed.); it comprises a series of short essays by literary agents, and they say some things I hadn't read before. (I will stop reading books about it and really do it now...)

I just bought a dozen books en español on eBay for $3.50. Good contemporary stuff you don't see in Spanish usually. I was the only bidder. I don't really eBay anymore--the potential expense is not in what passes for a budget around here--but I've been trying to find a cheap online source of books in Spanish for the store and poked my head in over there the other day and placed the lowest possible bid on this lot. This kind of thing can come in handy from time to time.

I had thought it would be a good thing to have Spanish books available for the Hispanic population up here. There are so many families from Mexico and south of there who work on the ranches. When I set up Lucero's computer at her family's home in Likely last fall I noticed not a single book anywhere in her house other than her father's musical instrument catalogs. I concluded it was because there are no books available in their language and had hopes of remedying that at the Golden Egg. Then friends and acquaintances began telling me that "Mexicans don't read books," and I thought that was such a racist or cultural-chauvinist thing to say, and I rejected it out of hand. I heard this so often, though, I finally had to check it out. At Google I searched on the phrase "Mexicans don't read books" just to see what I'd get. Lo--the first result was an article from May of this year in the Christian Science Monitor titled "Why Don't Mexicans Read Books?."

Disheartening, yes.

Apparently four out of ten bookstores in Mexico have gone under in the past decade, and to keep from losing them all the government has imposed price controls on book wholesalers.

This lack of interest in books makes sense from a cultural standpoint, I think: these are gregarious, extended-family-centered people, and reading is a distinctly antisocial activity.

And they may just have a point.

But keeping a couple of shelves of books in Spanish at the Egg couldn't hurt.
11:01:20 AM    comment []  trackback []