August 8, 2010
While I was gone…
- My Quill & Quire review of Alissa York’s Fauna is online here. It was such a pleasure to be able to write such an ecstatic review for this wonderful book (whose design is as gorgeous as the story). A celebration of bookishness, and of the animals that have populated our books, and those who hide in the secret corners of our cities. Her Toronto is also stunningly realized.
- And Finn Harvor has asked me to join his “Conversations in the Book Trade”, where I answered some of his questions about the current state of publishing and book culture.
I read “Conversations” and this caught my attention:
“people (aren’t) reading as much literature (or as much anything) as they used to”.
Wait – is this true? I see that the focus of the conversation is on publishing, an industry which is no doubt suffering and hasn’t quite figured out what to do with this whole fandangled interweb thingy. But reading? Is reading suffering? I’ve heard the opposite, that reading has never been more popular, with the advent of Oprah’s Book club etc, and also no doubt because of all the stuff (much of it crap, I’m sure) that you can access for free online. I’m guessing that reading isn’t suffering at all. I mean we’re probably all reading The Time Traveller’s Wife and Perezhilton.com, and not Beowulf, but hasn’t that always been true? Just maybe that people who might not normally be inclined to pick up a book have a few more resources now, and maybe that seems to water down the literature scene.
I can’t say for sure that people are reading more these days, but I think this quote is suspect!
I don’t think perezhilton.com counts as “reading”. It’s gleaning, but, that said, the last week I spent near a beach and every subway journey I took this past weekend suggests to me that reading itself is doing just fine. People need to buy more books though, and not from Costco. The declining state of the publishing industry is going to bite us all in the ass (just as the decline of newspapers have already).
Awesome review, Kerry! I now want to read Fauna. Glad you had a great vacation, sand and all…
You’ve certainly drawn me that much closer to Fauna; I’m particularly interested in “seeing” Toronto therein.