Several weeks ago, the NYTimes reported on the new NEA study that adults are reading more fiction books than in the last 25 years, reversing a trend where less than half of Americans over the age of 18 had read a play, poem, or work of fiction in the last 12 months.
Have you?
I've read several books, all histories and biographies (the biographies of George Eliot and Mrs. Beeton by Kathryn Hughes, Unredeemed Captive, to name a few off the top of my head. On my desk right now are histories of housework in both the U.S. and the U.K., as well as Taste: A Story of Britain through its Cooking ), but I don't think I've read a novel since the last Harry Potter book came out. Wait, when was Sarah Waters's Nightwatch, which was a Booker Prize finalist--I read that. (And I have Eric Carle memorized. Does that count?)
I am inspired to continue to squeeze reading into my daily activities, perhaps even expand my selections, by Michiko Kakutani's exploration of almost-President Barack Obama's reading habits. Her thumbnail list of his favorites include:
The Bible
“Parting the Waters,” Taylor Branch
“Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gandhi’s autobiography
“Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin
“The Golden Notebook,” Doris Lessing
Lincoln’s collected writings
“Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville
“Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison
Works of Reinhold Niebuhr
“Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson
Shakespeare’s tragedies
Except parts of the Bible and several of Shakespeare's tragedies, I'm embarrased to admit I haven't read any of those (I'm going to bet that my mom has read 75% of them, at least). I think I'll put Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals on my list, right after Geraldine Brooks's March, which isn't on the list but is on my nightstand. I haven't been much of a fiction reader (excludng my devouring of "history mysteries" as twinkie reading during my grad school days) and am illiterate when it comes to contemporary, or late 20th-century, fiction, which is a constant source of shame and regret since everyone thinks I'm caught up.
Even with my ignorance of contemporary fiction, I value it and was saddened to read Stanley Fish's piece on "The Last Professor." While specifically about the decline of the importance of the liberal arts and humanities at colleges and universities, Fish's essay really chronicles the demise of art and the humanitites, some commentors (they aren't really commentators, right?) called it culture, in our society. Because some disciplines, including philosophy and literature and my own art history, have no practical use in a market-driven state, which focuses on efficiency, productivity, and transparency, they will simply disappear. When universities have a puprose outside of their walls, for instance as Judith Warner has described in investigating the pharmaceutical company-research university connection, the universities and professors become corrupt. Considering Enron, Madoff, Wall Street, to name just a few, has a market-based, practical, producing society really stood us in good stead? There is money, of course, and the advantages it can buy, but beyond that? It's like major league sports . . . beyond making money, do they have value that transcends, say, books? If books could make money (which all indications are that they, and bookstores, are not), would this be a discussion?
Even if I don't read novels--or study philosophy--I want them to exist and for people to study them in a world far removed from the demands of the marketplace, just as I immersed myself in art history for so many years and still visit museums to revisit and rekindle that love. Intriguingly, in the essay, Fish referred to such places, the wealthy universities, as "functioning almost as museums." This seems to recall Theodor Adorno's notion of a museum as mausoleum, containing only dead artifacts and no longer relevant to "living" society. Are books and art really dead to us? Not to our new president, thankfully. And maybe Obama's own dedication to culture and the life of the mind will continue and encourage the trend that the NEA has spotted. And Stanley Fish will be wrong. Because in the end, I don't think Fish wants to be right.
I think I'm going to log off and go read.
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