Kevin Allman

No one reads anymore! (Well, not really.)

The Washington Post headline scares ya! Boo-YA!

ONE IN FOUR READ NO BOOKS LAST YEAR

If I had to guess, I would've put it higher. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that 50% of Americans didn't read any books last year. If 75% of the public is still reading books, isn't that good news? I guess not:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year -- half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

Way down in the story are the real numbers:

The publishing business totaled $35.7 billion in global sales last year, 3 percent more than the previous year, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association. About 3.1 billion books were sold, an increase of less than 1 percent.

The actual poll results and demographic breakdowns are interesting; they can be downloaded here.

Oprah picked me! Really! I swear!

Now this takes some serious stones: A self-published author claims that his new book was selected for Oprah's Book Club, and even publishes the "transcript" of his appearance on her talk show, not knowing (or, perhaps, caring) that such a claim could be easily disproved. Thomas Kilduff of Boston's Weekly Dig seems to have been the first to peel this particular onion:

We called him and asked when exactly he went before a live studio audience on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

"June 18, I believe," Schneider said, "but you'll have to check with my publicist."

Schneider's publicist didn't return calls for comment, nor did the author respond to requests to elaborate on his story.

Unfortunately, Oprah's people did, and they weren't amused. I suspect that they were particularly unamused by the "transcript" of the appearance on the liar's website, which has all the verisimiltude of one of those dreams we've all had where we accept an Oscar or a Heisman Trophy. If this is an example of the liar's literary skill, it's safe to assume he won't be moving out of self-publishing any time soon:

Oprah: So fasten your seat belts… because you are about to meet the author of Crossed Paths, who flew in from Cape Cod, Massachusetts just to spend some time with us today. Please join me in welcoming Bill Schneider.

Oprah: Bill, I must tell you that I immediately fell in love with this book when I first read it.

Schneider: Thank you. Thanks very much.

Oprah: Crossed Paths is truly a gem of story. Tell me how you came to write this very poignant book.

Schneider: Well, Oprah, it’s a story that really tugged at my heartstrings… and, ah, I felt very certain about this being a story that needed to be shared....

One person who swallowed this whole is Steve Desroches, a reporter for the Cape Codder, who profiled this liar and seemed to do no fact-checking at all. Apparently nothing about the story tripped his bullshit meter. Not the fact that Oprah isn't inclined to select publish-on-demand titles. Not the fact that no one else in a very small town seemed to be talking about it. Not the fact that this best-selling author was still working for the town's tourism board. Today Desroches explains:

I think it is important that as I go about my work as a reporter to not become too cynical and to think with compassion and understanding as I learn and write about people who may be different from myself. So I’ve thought hard about this. I guess everyone lies from time to time....

What I do know is that I feel like a fool and I was taken for one. And since I guess I didn’t learn it in journalism school, I will check out the facts in my stories much more closely...

And as for the bogus transcript, well, hey, Dan Rather didn’t check out those fake documents about the Bush administration and the Iraq War.

Well, hey.

I can only surmise that Mr. Desroches is very, very young. And his editor is equally to blame for this. But here's a tip for both of them. The liar has taken down the Oprah claim from his website (and that website should've been a clue right there), but his biography is still up there:

Bill’s analysis (primarily about the travel and the music industries) has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Billboard, New York Times, London Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Village Voice....   Bill’s  teleplays include Terror on the Thames for the BBC and Luck of the Draw for  PBS.

That's quite a c.v. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to be "too cynical."

The violence-plagued world of poetry criticism

Normally I wouldn't give a rip about squabbles in the world of academic poetry, but this 2002 Slate piece by Eric McHenry, about a controversial poetry critic named William Logan, had me from this sentence:

"For the most part, academic poetry has managed to remain free of the rivalries, violence, and excess that trouble its more flamboyant cousin, gangsta rap...."

The funniest novel I've read this year

...is Winner of the National Book Award, by Jincy Willett. (Yes, that's the title.)

I picked it up because Willett showed up on that New York magazine list of The Best Writers You've Never Read, which was dead-on in this case. The back cover had blurbs from the likes of David Sedaris, Tom Perrotta, and Augusten Burroughs ("the funniest novel I have read...ever"). The phrase "laughing out loud" has been seriously devalued in our LOL world, but twice in the first 20 pages I had to stick my finger between the pages to keep from losing my place as I shook from laughter.

What's it about? Well -- middle-aged twins. Abigail is the town pump and accused murderess whose story has just been told in a cheapjack true-crime book; Dorcas is her mordant sister, the town librarian who is leafing through the book while awaiting Hurricane Pandora. That's it. And it's hilarious.

Willett's website, "I Would Not Burn the Library of Alexandria For You," is just as funny; her sales page is called "Buy Something, You Cheap Chiseler," and it has the best author biography ever:

Who is Jincy?

An aging, bitter, unpleasant woman living in Escondido, California, who spends her days parsing the sentences of total strangers and her nights teaching and writing. Sometimes, late at night, in the dark, she laughs inappropriately.

I half-love Jincy Willett, and I'm quite sure the sentiment is not reciprocated, which makes me love her even more.

Fiction & disasters (natural and unnatural)

Whenever there's a crisis in America, writers spring up to try to make sense out of it, to turn tragedy into art. For a few years, everyone is too close. What comes out is agitprop, or sentimental slop, or some sort of placeholder that takes up the space until another writer has the time and wisdom to turn the incomprehensible into a story that both encapsulates the crisis and, somehow, doesn't need the crisis to be a work of art. It took John Steinbeck to make The Grapes of Wrath out of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, Michael Herr to synthesize the Vietnam experience into Dispatches, Tony Kushner to forge Angels in America out of the devastation of AIDS.

It took Patty Friedmann less than two years to produce A Little Bit Ruined, which is one of the earliest in a raft of novels about Hurricane Katrina, but I think it will end up being remembered as one of the first and best. I finished it last night and am still blown away by Friedmann's storytelling and sense of humor. Not sure yet if it's her best novel (that may be Side Effects), but there are characters and passages in there that are both universal and so Katrina-specific that they're indelible. Like this one, in which the delusional narrator, Eleanor Rushing, finds herself in Houston and can think of nothing but going home:

And from all I sense, people from New Orleans now are citizens of everywhere and should have hermit crab sorts of privileges. If we burrow in somewhere, we're home, and no one should take anything away from us....

Houston is hundreds of square miles of nothing but Metairie. A warehouse for extremely comfortable people. Their homes probably don't have grease in the kitchens or dirt on the baseboards, they park in their driveways, for Chrissakes. And I've never seen so many supermarkets. One supermarket has a Barnes & Noble next door. Every franchise in the world has an outlet every ten blocks here. No one needs to worry about imagining anything because whatever they see on TV is available, and they don't have to make anything up. If they see an infomercial and want that stuff that sprays on carpets and eliminates pet odors, it's in a store nearby. If their kid sees the XBox360 at a friend's house, it's in six Houston stores when it's not anywhere else.

I heard Richard's little girls turning into Houstonians in Radio Shack that day. Too much comfort here. I haven't seen one bumper sticker. This is a terrible excuse for a city because it is just a giant suburb, and people with character shouldn't live here.

Richard can leave Tina and his children here, but he needs to go back to New Orleans. He can do reconstructive surgery. There will always be damage.

Writers to be grateful for: Patty Friedmann

One of New Orleans' best writers, Patty Friedmann, is back with a new book: A Little Bit Ruined, the sequel to her second-most-wonderful book, Eleanor Rushing. (Eleanor was #1 until Patty published Side Effects last year and blew her previous works out of the water...or "out da box," as we say.)

A Little Bit Ruined is also one of the first big pieces of fiction to examine the city post-Katrina. As Patty says on her website:

Except for education and natural disasters, I’ve always lived in New Orleans. That’s the only part of my bio anyone needs to know. As a writer, I need to be here to hear the voices on the streets—and, yes, in my head. My work is darkly comical, and New Orleans is an engaging old lady in every story, a beauty past her prime who still looks in mirrors, unaware that she’s ravaged, even now, too preoccupied with her looks ever to have taken care of her goofy children....

The storm lifted the board and showed the termites underneath here, but I’m still not sure anybody gets us. We’re the only city in the world with a collective sense of humor and irony, and that’s all anyone needs to know when reading one of my books.

Yes, yes, yes, and true dat.

Years ago, Patty and I both had short plays in the wonderful omnibus series Native Tongues. Mine was about a convenience-store clerk in the French Quarter; Patty's was about one of the city's ubiquitous meter maids, complaining about her job, her family, her hyperactive kid. The woman was running short on the boy's medication, and was trying to decide how to ration out the last Ritalin -- should she give it to him before school, or when he got home? -- which spawned a line that made me crack up every time I heard it: "What's the use of him being good if I'm not home to see it?"

A Little Bit Ruined is, today, at #297,657 at Amazon.com. In a perfect world, Patty would be jousting with J.K. Rowling for #1 and the woman who wrote The Secret would be gathering trash alongside the I-10. But that's life.

(Oh, and Patty now has a blog, and that's pretty funny, too.)

Today's Willamette Week

I've got two short pieces in today's Willamette Week--a look at some Oregonians who are continuing the Katrina relief effort, and a review of John Sheppard's novel Small Town Punk (Sheppard is reading at Powell's on Thursday night).

Very much worth reading, in a "welcome to Portland" way: Julie Sabatier's story about a local collective bookstore, the 9/11 "alternative theory" group that meets there, and the former AM Northwest happy-chat woman turned gubernatorial candidate and vegetarian Christian 9/11 conspiracy theorist (are you following me?) who was disinvited from speaking to the group because it turns out she's also against gay marriage and abortion rights. I hate it when that happens.

Books are obsolete

No one reads book reviews. At least that's the conclusion of the shareholders (I hope it's not the editors) at the Los Angeles Times, which is planning to shrink its Sunday book review section, package it with the op-eds, drop it from the Sunday paper, and put it in the Saturday edition (which is the least-read edition of the week at any major daily).

The San Francisco Chronicle had a good piece on what it might mean for other newspapers, which will be watching the Times experiment:

The plan to retool the L.A. Times Book Review was first reported by LAObserved, an online media review. The report set readers on edge. Any such change could suggest a reduction in book coverage nationwide, since the Times runs  one of the few remaining stand-alone book sections in a daily newspaper. (The others are in the [San Francisco] Chronicle, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and San Diego Union-Tribune. The Boston Globe merged its opinion pages and book review in 2002.)

And the Wall Street Journal chimes in:

Book publishers in recent years have moved away from buying ads in standalone book-review sections in favor of paying to stack mounds of books in the front of chain bookstores....

In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores -- the average 25,000-square-foot store in the Barnes & Noble Inc. chain now stocks between 125,000 and 150,000 titles -- the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.

Technology writer and book reviewer Mark A. Kellner offers an interesting take on the situation:

It may not be an exact equivalent, but 35 years ago, a lot of newspapers had regular columns -- by 'moonlighting' staff or low-paid or non-paid freelancers -- covering both stamp and coin collecting....

Times change. One- or two-paragraph book reviews on amazon.com often carry as much weight with book buyers as anything Michiko Kakutani might write in the NYT.

Mmmmaybe. A reader-submitted Amazon review is certainly cheaper. But most of the reviews I read there are either one-star or five-stars (total crap! total genius!), and a lot of them are obviously written by people who haven't read the book, but who have an ideological ax that needs scratching, an ideological itch that needs grinding.

Naturally, I don't like the trend -- book reviewing puts ducats in my pockets. But I think the papers are missing a larger point: When you're complaining about slumping subscription rates, why would you make a move destined to disappoint people who are avid readers?

Liveblogging the Tennessee Williams festival

I'm going to New Orleans at the end of March for the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, and I've decided to liveblog the event for those who want to be there but can't attend.

The Festival is always a blast--besides the panels, interviews, booksignings, and such, it wouldn't be New Orleans without lots of parties (both planned and impromptu), food, and liquor (they sell mint juleps in the courtyard outside the main venue). Somebody is guaranteed to misbehave.

It's a great list of participants this year, including Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Yusef Komunyakaa; local notables like Douglas Brinkley, Chris Wiltz, and Andrei Codrescu; and big names including Calvin Trillin, Sharyn McCrumb, and John Waters. And I'm really looking forward to meeting Haven Kimmel, whose A Girl Named Zippy is one of my favorite modern memoirs ever.

Will liveblogging work? Does New Orleans have a reliable wireless Internet connection anywhere in the French Quarter? Will anyone care? Who knows. It'll be fun.

"The greatest Oregon book of all time"

Portland Monthly asked its readers to vote on "the greatest Oregon book of all time," and the results are in. Out of the 20 nominations, I've read...just two of the authors. Boy, do I feel like a dope. And I've only ever heard of three of the authors: Beverly Cleary, Ken Kesey, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Coming in at #1 (with 21% of the vote) is Cleary's great children's book Ramona the Pest, which will probably be read and enjoyed for decades to come. #2 is Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, which I've never had the notion to pick up (though I did enjoy One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest). But I've never even touched Kesey's hippie stuff, and while I know that Le Guin is the best at what she does, science fiction generally leaves me cold.

Of interest to me were two writers/books that didn't even make the list: Chuck Palahniuk, best known for Fight Club, and Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love. Why? These may not be all-time worldbeater Great American Novels, but I have to believe there was more imagination in Geek Love than there was in some of the 20 ultrasupergreats.

I suspect that a lot of people dismiss Dunn and Palahniuk as "cult writers," which is just as short-sighted and condescending as relegating, say, James Baldwin to the African-American shelf. And there are a lot of so-called "cult writers" (Douglas Coupland and Poppy Z. Brite, for two) who deserve wider readership and less condescension.

Anyway, the list of the greatest Oregon books of all time seemed awfully hinky to me, but maybe it's because Portland is such a young city. There's a canon of Los Angeles and San Francisco literature, for instance, but nothing of the kind in the Northwest...which should probably be seen as opportunity rather than paucity.