Nobody Reads

I asked one of my close friends if he read one of my Substack essays recently. He said he got part of the way through it and then got distracted. Part of the way through it? It’s only 1,500 words! What, are you a goldfish? (I’m not really worried that he might read this, either.)

Much has been written about the shortened American attention span, but I don’t think people have read any of that, either. People don’t read anything. I know quite a few people—smart people—who never read books, ever. And in spite of being an accomplished writer, I don’t read as much as I could or I should—probably about 15-20 books a year. It’s not that people aren’t buying books—they’re buying audiobooks. Audiobook sales have grown 53% in the last five years. I have never “read” an audiobook, and in fact, I don’t think that listening to audiobooks counts as reading. When people tell me that they “read” an audiobook, I give them the silent scorn. I haven’t had someone read me a book since I was about three. I don’t think the audiobook phenomenon is about time management. Unless you are a very slow reader, you will finish a physical book faster than you will an audiobook. People listen to audiobooks because they can multi-task, like while driving, except if you’re multi-tasking, you’re not paying any attention. One last note about audiobooks—there are all kinds of problems with the narration. Ideally, the author will narrate it, but I hate narrating my own books, so I get someone else to do it. I have a guy. He is very good, and got high marks for his narration of Street Freak, but some have told me that his tone in narrating No Worries is a bit angry, which was clearly not the intent. Also, some authors are just terrible at narrating their own books. There is no ambiguity about words on a page. More information you didn’t need: it costs about $400/hour to hire a narrator for an audiobook, and an average size book will take about 8-10 hours, which means you have to sell about 500 audiobooks just to break even. Doesn’t sound like much, but it is. Of course, at some point in the future, AI will be narrating all the audiobooks, perhaps in the author’s voice.

Here is a thing that I discovered on my writing sabbatical. I have done a lot of writing this week, but I have also done a lot of reading. I finished a monster short story collection, an issue of Granta, and I’ve taken a chunk out of a collection of interviews with Barry Hannah, much more reading than I usually do in a week. It made me smarter. Yes, doing all this reading made me smarter, and it made me a better writer, too. This is what they tell aspiring writers: do a lot of reading, and you will get better at writing. It is absolutely true. If you lift weights you will get stronger. If you run, you will get faster. And if you read books, you will get smarter. I know a lot of people who lift weights and run who tell me to lift weights and run who have never read a fucking book in their entire life. My usual hobby horse about our focus on physical achievements versus intellectual achievements. When was the last time you saw someone on Instagram…reading a book? At least Lebron James made a pretense of reading books, even though he was always on page 5.

Nobody has time. Well, fucking make time! You make time to lift weights and run. Maybe make some time to read a book? You learn shit. I read a very cool travel essay in my MFA program about the khat trade in Djibouti. Where else, other than a book, are you going to learn about the khat trade in Djibouti? It was called “High in Hell,” and it became one of my favorite creative nonfiction pieces of all time. I read a book once about a woman who had to perform surgery on herself in the middle of winter in the South Pole. I read a short story, a futuristic short story about a company that outsources bad feelings from rich Americans to IT workers in India. I have never taken hallucinogens, but I suspect this is what it might be like. You read, and you travel through space and time.

“Well, I read so much for work that I don’t have time to read for pleasure.” Well, that is fucking sad. Imagine being condemned to reading five 200-page research pieces every day for the rest of your life, and nothing else. Who reads for pleasure? Primarily women. Chick lit and romance for sure, but practically all literary or commercial fiction is consumed by women. Men read nonfiction and business books and the occasional Tucker Max joint or a thing about Navy SEALs. This means that if you are me, and you are writing commercial or literary fiction, you have to appeal to women, or else you are toast. Thusly, 80% of fiction is now written by women. How do you get men to read fiction? That is actually a big topic of discussion these days, and it seems to be recursive—men aren’t reading fiction because there is no fiction that appeals to them. It’s all nose ring faculty lounge fiction. Much of the storytelling these days involves a female protagonist without flaws. Literally, there is nothing wrong with them. If you don’t believe me, check out Wicked, Moana, or the Daisy Ridley Star Wars movies. To me, protagonists aren’t interesting unless they have flaws. Now, people have to be able to root for your hero, but human beings are complex and imperfect, which is what makes them interesting. As I write my new novel, I’m contemplating giving my protagonist a mild sex addiction, or at least have him make some bad sexual choices. We’ve all been there.

No man is reading any of this stuff. I cannot think of one instance in the last ten years when a man recommended a novel to me. Nonfiction books, sure—for example, someone once recommended that I read Boys in the Boat. Can’t think of a time when a man recommended a novel, let alone a short story collection. When I released my own short story collection, it was a bit lost in translation, and the 2300 people who did read it were probably reading fiction for the first time in their lives. It was well-received, except for the dude who wrote on Goodreads that it was “misogynistic dreck.” If you are a man with a penis calling a book misogynistic, I don’t know what to say to you. Whatever you do, don’t read any Barry Hannah. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Night Moves was misogynistic. Chauvinistic, maybe, but not misogynistic. See for yourself.

Interestingly, book sales are ticking up a bit, especially when you take audiobooks into account, but even physical book sales went up last year, and have been going up since the pandemic. Still, the problem is that in 1990, there were 5,000 bookstores in the United States, and now there are 1,250, and there is no better place to shop for a book than a bookstore. Amazon dot bomb can recommend you some books, but the algorithm sucks and you can only see a few at a time, and it just keeps feeding you the same stuff over and over again. Walk into a bookstore, and you can check out all the books. I am still in Oxford and I went to Square Books today, and I was browsing, I came across the Faulkner section (there is unsurprisingly a Faulkner section at Square Books in Oxford), and picked out As I Lay Dying. Paid with a $20 bill. For all my education, I have never read Faulkner. I will give it a try. No chance I would have bought it off of Amazon.

Let’s talk for a minute about the etiquette of gifting books. The etiquette is that you probably shouldn’t do it. First of all, there is a 99% chance that you’re going to gift a book that someone won’t like. You’re gifting it because you like it, but you don’t know what the other person likes, so it will probably sit on a shelf somewhere. Second of all, it’s like gifting someone a vacuum cleaner. Great, but now I have to spend ten hours cleaning the house. A book is a big time commitment, and when you give someone a book, the implication is that you’re going to suck up ten hours of their time, on a book that they probably won’t have chosen for themselves. They won’t read it, and then you’ll blow up their phone, asking if they read it, and it will get awkward. Lots of people gifted No Worries to sons and daughters, nieces and nephews. Thank you for doing that. Problem is, the kids never read it. Too busy on TikTok, I suspect, getting back to my earlier point. People send me dozens of books a year, and then they get butthurt when I don’t read them. Sorry! There is other stuff I want to read.

When was the last time you read a book? Like, all the way through? I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get on the treadmill if you read a book. Acknowledge to me that intellectual pursuits are just as important as athletic pursuits. I would rather be fat and smart than fit and dumb. I used to know a guy in high school who thought that the more he whacked off, the bigger his dick would get. Unsurprisingly, he masturbated constantly. Well, I don’t know about that, but I can say for sure that the more you read, the smarter (and more worldly, and sophisticated) you will get. And it’s fun. In my new house, I have a library—it’s like a big sunroom, and I spent $4,000 at Restoration Hardware to have this big sheepskin chaise delivered. That is my reading chair, and it’s comfy as hell. I have no excuse, and neither do you.