Lazy Readers

Working in a bookstore, you see almost everything. Really, working retail, you see almost everything, but book retail in and of itself seems to have its own unique set of... 'customer challenges' to overcome.

I love the people who come in and say, "I'm looking for a book-- it was on one of your tables somewhere up front there about 3 months ago and it was blue. What was it?" I love people who come in and say, "I saw a book on the news this morning. I don't know the title, I don't know the author, and I don't really know what it was about, but it looked interesting." I love the people who come in and say, "I'm looking for a particular book, but all I know about it is that it has the word 'The' in the title." I love the people who are completely surprised that you, as a bookseller, haven't actually read every single book in the store. And I love the people who come in looking for a book that they don't really want to read.

I'm not talking about kids in school, either. Believe me, I remember being in high school and being assigned book after book after book to read for my Honors English classes. You'd think, as an avid reader, that that would have been a joyous assignment for me, but really, it bred me to loathe certain works or certain authors. And I loathed them for nothing other than the sheer fact that I was being forced to read them at a point in time where I either a) couldn't really connect to what I was reading, or b) was so completely bogged down with schoolwork and extra-curriculars that I simply didn't have the time to sit and decipher 300+ pages of text for theme, symbolism, metaphors, etc, etc, etc. And most of the time, there was a lot of both a and b going on. I will freely admit that Cliffs Notes became my best friends. They got me through Great Expectations, The Once and Future King, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Julius Caesar...

It's not that I didn't try to actually read them-- I did. I really did want to delve into these classics and become immersed in them, but I very easily got bogged down in the language, or in the endless pages of dry and boring narrative, and the book quickly lost my interest. I remember only a few books that I really enjoyed being made to read: Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler, Tara Road by Maeve Binchy, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.... and I think that's it. I remember the projects I had to do in my Junior year, though, where I had to pick a piece of classic literature, not from any set list, but just something that I wanted to read (teacher approved, of course), and do a creative project about it. I chose Pygmalion, Green Mansions, Breakfast at Tiffany's (notice the Audrey Hepburn theme there), and To Kill a Mockingbird.

QUESTION: What was the difference between these classics and the ones that I simply couldn't seem to get through?

ANSWER: That I wanted to read them.

Now, I am not advocating taking reading assignments out of the school. Quite the contrary. I think making kids read is a good thing. Otherwise, many of them would simply choose not to do it at all and then where would society be? Do I think that kids should have a bit more choice in their reading curriculum? Definitely. It made English assignments a lot more fun for me. Do I think classics should go by the wayside? Absolutely not! They are classics for a reason and deserve to be read and studied. Some people actually enjoy them. Should they be taught differently? Well... that might help. Because let me tell you, if I was reading The Great Gatsby simply to engross myself in the story rather than committing 'murder of enjoyment of a novel by means of forced over-analysis', I'll bet you any money that I would have liked it more. Or liked it at all. (Note to teachers: discussion after reading= good. Worksheets to be filled out as you're reading= bad. And now they make kids highlight in 5 different colors and take notes in the margins and practically desecrate the book in the process of reading!)

But the point I'm trying to make here (in a long, roundabout way) is that there are so many adults out there who are looking for books... books that no one is forcing them to read, that they have some interest in-- interest enough it inquire about them at the bookstore-- but that they don't have any desire in actually reading.

For instance, the man who asked me if we had Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and after I found it for him, asked me if we instead had it in graphic novel form because he had been watching the movie and really liked it, but somehow missed the ending and just wanted to see how the story wrapped up. Or the people who come in looking for audio books because they have no desire to actually sit down and read a book-- they just want the story recited to them. All of the fun and none of the work.

Don't get me wrong-- I love audio books. I mean, have you heard the ones for the Harry Potter series? Jim Dale, who narrates them, uses HUNDREDS of fantastic and unique character voices. I have never heard a book come so alive on tape. In fact, I've been listening to HP & the Deathly Hallows in the car for the past week or so. They're a great form of entertainment during the times when I literally cannot read at the moment: behind the wheel, or running at the gym.

But there is nothing like actually sitting down and reading a book-- using your imagination to envision the world that the author has created, instead of letting someone else interpret that world for you. As a book lover, I just don't understand the desire to gravitate away from the traditional printed page. I know that any interest in reading is good interest. Would I rather have someone listen to an audio book or read a graphic novel than not read a book in any form at all? 100% of course. But why are some people so determined to shy away from the actual novel? Where did this come from? Is this a recent thing? Has the invention of the graphic novel and the rise of the audio book possibly hurt the traditional novel format? I don't have any sort of an answer to that, but customers like the ones I mentioned certainly make me wonder, make me think.

Or is it because they were forced to read books that were uninteresting to them in their early school years? Did that tarnish their enjoyment of reading later on? I've loved books from the time I was born, but it certainly did for me, at least in some ways. Give me anything with any period language in it and my eyes glaze over. However, I still have Emma, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Oliver Twist sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for me to read them... someday... No promises about how soon that's actually going to happen. I still do want to read them, though, so I guess I'm probably a little atypical. Maybe my own experiences don't really figure into answering this.

I'd love to ask these people where this aversion to actual books comes from. Were they not big readers to begin with? Did Dickens and all his 'paid by the word' description scare them away? Was War and Peace too intimidating because you could probably use it to fill in the space of any missing bricks on your house? Did they start reading The Jungle, thinking it was about exotic animals and safaris only to find that the animals in question weren't lions but cows, and that they would never again be able to look at a hamburger in the same way again?

Or is it plain and simple laziness? Are Cliff and his notes somewhat to blame? Have we become such a 'quick fix' society that we automatically look for the easiest way out? To those of us who enjoy reading, that idea is simply ludicrous. But to those for whom reading is somewhat of a chore...

I had to keep myself from laughing the other day at the high school student who asked me if we had Cliffs Notes for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Read the book, I told them. Not only because, no, Cliff has not taken notes on that yet, but because it was good. I read it all in one night. You'll probably like it. You're lucky you get to read that instead of, oh, say... The Awakening, like I had to read in high school. Of course, when I was that age, on the search for Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick (which they do have, thank God, and which, yes, I know, would be incredibly hard to read in one night), if a bookseller had said the same thing to me, I probably would have hurt them.

And, I swear, if anyone today comes in and asks for Cliffs Notes for any Jodi Picoult novel, I will seriously have to hurt them too.

:)