Throwback Thursday: Why I'm not worried about the Generation of the Book

This post was first published 24 April 2012 in a slightly different version.

The other day, I was wandering aimlessly through the campus of Pacific Lutheran University (these things happen) so of course, I stopped and wandered into their bookstore.

As I walked in, I noticed that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.

It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has taken over.

(Cue instant graying of hair.)

My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.

We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a Thing with us. And I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes. In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary tastes and were ordered to climb it.

This seems better to me somehow.

And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.

For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, the Millenials (as we're calling them at the moment, apparently) are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.

Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.

Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.

But this is not -- as is often alleged -- just a culture of the cribnote. It is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.

They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.

But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.

I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?

Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.

At least I have reason to hope so.

Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.

Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.

And this is not just shelf after shelf of trifling teenage Drama, Harry Potter ripoffs, and vampires. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there: David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Dave Eggers, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Don't believe me? Let me Google that for you. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.

Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.

If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.

Tree Octopus II :: The Internet Is Made for Suckers?

Someone at Newsy.com sent me a great note about my musings on information literacy regarding the Tree Octopus and how the media reported the wrong story the wrong way.  The end of the email pointed me to a great summary of their own, and I liked it enough to post it for you.

pp

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

Language Unleashed :: Words in the Radiolab

Words, words, words.  What are they?  We know that they are slippery things, as Shakespeare reminds us.  Their power to confound is as great as their power to shape beauty and feeling.  With words we can encapsulate the quintessence of man and capture the conscience of a king... or we can fritter them away and let meaning slip our fingers. 

But is society possible without them?

Nowhere (outside of Shakespeare) is this discussion more artfully encompassed (at least in my opinion) than on a recent show called Radiolab.  And in fact, no discussion of language - least of all the English language - can be undertaken without delving into Shakespeare, so much of our modern language and idiom owes much of its existence to his prolific pen.  Ranging from the deaf learning their way in a world of noises they cannot hear to the scribblings of the Bard of Avon, the Radiolab guys trace what words are, what they mean and how the connect with meaning in our brains.

How much human society is possible without words?  How much has language formed us rather than the other way around?

I should point out that when I first encountered this story, I came in toward the end.  And I didn't like what I heard.  I got in the car, turned on the engine and got only the end of the story.  Lacking any of the necessary context to understand the discussion already underway, I found it difficult to catch up.  From what I was able to glean, I couldn't really grok what they were on about. 


The show regularly paints word pictures and challenges the bounds of radio, stretching the possibilities of the spoken word.  Their give & take format and conversational progression intercut with interviews and soundbytes is an artful way to present stories, but this is both blessing and curse because as I discovered, it makes it difficult to come in late.

I couldn't catch up.  So I did what I always do -- I went looking for the answers and found the podcast and listened to the end, astounded that what had seemed unsupported assumptions about the nature of language were - of course - much more than that.  In fact, many of my own assumptions about words and the structure of language and thought were at fault.  Whether or not any of that is true, the story is just as amazing and beautiful as I knew it had to be.  It is a journey and to jump in in the middle is to do a disservice to your storyteller and your fellow travelers.

At this point you would be well-served to take an hour and listen to the original and moving episode "Words" HERE.

When I took the time to listen to the full show, my mind was blown.  Thoughts were provoked, gobs were smacked, and the relationship between words and symbolism and the physical objects they refer to took on new depth and meaning.

I'm still assimilating it all.  I'm not entirely sure I agree with every conclusion, but it is nonetheless a fascinating story, artfully told and it's a darn fine way to spend an hour of your life.  Take it from me, I'm parsimonious with my hours and this is one I don't want back.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
trippingly on the tongue...

Hamlet

As a bonus, below is a followup video to the show, further exploring the topic.  Two Radiolab contributors bring us out of the radio and into a visual style of wordplay in "an exploration of how language connects our inner thoughts to the outside world." 

Beautifully done!

Time & Space

I am intrigued by this video. 

If we cannot get people of the current time aesthetic to sit still for a class, how do we get them to sit for a complete novel?  This is interesting, but I'm not certain that I am convinced.  For one thing, I do not accept that there is any single vector for the epidemic of the dropout phenomenon.  If this is true, for instance, why is it that the most dynamic and growing segment of book sales is YA?

Food for thought, though.

Rock the Vote

The votes have been tabulated, the finalists chosen, it's time for the runoff election! It's time to make your voice heard and the choices will not be easy. I'm speaking, of course, of the race for the best book to win the National Book Award for Fiction in the past 60 years. Should the honors go to an anthology? Was the chief among equals the stories John Cheever, Flannery O'connor, Eudora Welty or William Faulkner? Or should it go to a novel? The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison or Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon? The National Book Award Foundation wants to know what you think. Which of these giants towers just that much above the rest? I'm not going to endorse a candidate, though I've already voted. Dust off your bookshelves, dear readers and polish your erudition. Remember that every vote counts -- your vote counts -- and those who don't vote don't get to bitch about the results. (Well, they do, but we're going to ignore them when they do.) At the moment, Flannery O'connor is way out in front and Ralph Ellison is following hard on her heels. Incidentally, people periodically ask me for book recommendations -- check the National Book Awards website for a list of some of the greatest works to be committed to the page in the last six decades. Good reading!

Literary Newsday...

Saturday is newsday apparently... Lev Grossman - Time book critic and author of The Magicians and Codex - has an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the revolutions in literature are coming from the ranks of popular authors rather than trickling across the border from the avant garde. I don't necessarily agree with him on every point, but the overall thesis seems sound and well-argued. Well worth the read. Reading By the Numbers is a startling op/ed from the New York Times about the so-called "Renaissance Learning" software that assigns numerical values to books. Children in schools that use this software are required to read so many points' worth of books. The manner in which these points are assigned seems haphazard at best, for instance Hamlet is worth fewer points than the most recent Gossip Girl book. The whole thing is faintly appalling and hopefully the publicity can help get some things changed. If nothing else, the software designers really need to re-think how the frigging points are assigned because they seem to be missing the whole point of reading as a transformative experience rather than an exercise in cramming more words into our students' heads.

Writing Life, Part Two: A Literate Lineage

In an email last year, my mother intimated to me that she didn't feel that they had contributed significantly to my writing skills. (Such as they are.) I wish to say here and now, in front of God and these witnesses... Au contraire!  

I'm still trying to decide if she meant she didn't want credit for all this... (it's a bit late for that, don't you think?)  

We'll set aside the fact that dad accidentally taught me to type partly because he didn't like my messy handwriting and simply point out that my upbringing (as previously noted) was quite literary. 

Both of my parents tattooed the love of reading into my psyche. Mrs Robinson and the English teachers that preceded her may have taught me to care about the difference between "it's" and "its", but that doesn't get mom and dad off the hook.  

My friends will tell you that I talk about my parents a lot and with good reason. They brought to me the worlds of Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard, and the rest. I came to be aware of a wider world than that of our small town in Missouri. Mark Twain alone (who was also coincidentally from a small town in Missouri) made me believe that this was something I could do too. We went to libraries instead of sitting at home watching TV. 

I wanted to be well read because it looked like A Good Thing To Be. In our house, it was the only way to be.  

Mom & dad also taught me funny. But that's more than how to tell a joke. I was introduced not only to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but to Red Skelton and Jack Benny. I learned that being funny didn't require a four-letter vocabulary and that clever was better than brassy (the most important lesson any writer can learn in my opinion) and not to bite off a subject I can't chew. 

It's appropriate that my first published short story was a humorous lark about daylight savings time being used to avert Armageddon. 

I also learned that "neatness counts" and if I can't write it neatly, then type it. I got all that somewhere, and I don't really think I got it at school. I couldn't have because honestly, I wasn't really paying that much attention in class. (ahem)  When my fourth grade teacher challenged my authorship of a paper, dad went to bat for me. "Yes, a fourth grader really can write like that..." Incidentally, I began my first novel that year. (I recall it later caused trouble with the administration because it was an action-adventure kids-are-smarter-than-adults kind of novel and they didn't approve of such notions.)  

Most writers I know are readers who read something somewhere along the way and say "Psht! I could do better than that!" This is generally followed by someone who says, "Really? Then maybe you should." For me, it was my parents, who told me it was ok to be a writer as long as I got my homework done first. (Not that I ever did...) 

Parents who make it a Good Thing to be well-read, literate, and well-spoken are forming adults who hold the same values even if we don't seem to be getting it at the time. I'm not sure my parents appreciate how rare they were when compared to the parents of my friends in highschool and college. No matter how you cut it, parenting as much as anything made me a writer. 

Sorry, mom. You're just going to have to accept your share of the blame... er... credit.

-Scott 

Out-Liars

Reuters reports that 2 out of 3 Britons lie about what books they've read in order to appear more literate and cultured than they really are. The same study indicates that rather than George Orwell, the Brits like nothing better than curling up with a little something by JK Rowling on a cold winter's night.

"According to the survey, 65 percent of people have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out "1984." Next on the list came "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy and in third place was James Joyce's "Ulysses."

I can't find statistics on the USA but I'd wager that the numbers are similar.

There's a certain cachet to being seen as well-read but how many people really put the time in necessary to really be well-read? Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I'd wager that it's probably fewer than we'd all like it to be. Then again, a buddy of mine who went to college in Buffalo told me about a bar near the college that was called "The Library" so maybe people weren't lying... maybe they were confused.

None of this is a howling revelation about human nature, but it occurs to me to wonder why people feel the need to do this. Anyone who is on Facebook has probably been hit with the "The BBC thinks we're howling idiots because we've only read six of the following 100 books" meme in one of it's many forms. Setting aside the fact that the meme is of specious origins and ignoring the fact that it would be difficult to have graduated high school without breaking the putative "six of these books" mark, it's not hard to see how these things might lead to a bit of truth-stretching. After a quick troll through Facebook I'm inclined to give anecdotal witness that this is indeed happening on a wide scale.

People are lying about being well read.

Lying about their reading habits... to impress people! Which means it must be "cool" to be well read, right?

The first thing that strikes me about of this is the idea that there's some sort of waiting list to get into the Book Nerd clique. It certainly wasn't like that when I was in high school. Did we take over the world when I wasn't looking? That's nice. I must've missed that issue of the newsletter. We shall endeavor to be benevolent masters. Get thee to the library... no, the one with books in it!

All of that sounds a bit snobbish, and I apologize. When you rule the world, it can go to your head. Don't worry, we won't insist upon swirlies except in those cases where there's a "ticking clock" and the jock in question has refused to relinquish his lunch money to the people hurling Shakespearean insults at him.

Regardless of who rules the world I would like to encourage you to join the nerd coalition. Just remember that true nerddom isn't about knowing stuff. And it's not about glasses and pocket protectors. It's a bit about being unathletic and unpopular, though, now that we're in power, I've tabled a resolution to repeal that line of the nerdstitution. (How else are we going to explain Danica McKellar?) It is about learning and enjoying learning.

And maybe a little bit about being in a marching band.  

Joking aside, the only way to become truly, actually, honestly well-read is to read. Read anything. I don't care what it is. Read mystery novels. Read thrillers. Read adventure yarns. Read history books. Read novels with ripped bodices on the cover. Read kids books. If you don't have time to read books, read short stories. Just read.

I'm wagering that a decent percentage of you will get over the taste of your literary Happy Meals and wonder what else is out there and begin sampling the Kobe burgers and filet of the bookworld. Before you know it, you'll be a book nerd too, part of the new ruling class. It could be that you were already among us and just don't know it.

Don't lie though. Because there might be a quiz later, an entrance exam that you won't find on Facebook so I would invite you to actually improve your literacy instead of lying about it.

Just be thankful we're not making you take the math version of the test. Welcome to the Nerd World Order.

What are YOUR must-read books? What's on your "Desert Island List"? Loan us a book or ten in the comments, wouldja?! I don't enjoy reading if someone else if forcing me to do it, but in case you need a list, the ones below are worth your time...
Literature  
100 Best (English) Novels (according to Modern Library) 

100 Best (Western) Novels (according to Time Magazine)

Genre  
100 Best Mystery Novels (according to HRF Keating)
100 Best Adventure Novels (according to National Geographic)
100 Best Romance Novels (according to TheRomanceReader.com)
100 Best Books for Teenagers by the ALA (American Library Association)
1000 Sci Fi Novels "Everyone must read" (according to The Guardian)

To Kindle or not to Kindle? Round II

I own thousands of books. Old-fashioned pasteboard, buckram, leather and paper. I love the written word in all its forms and the ebook is something I am very gradually coming to terms with over the Luddite impulses that have generally ruled my reading life.

As part of my ongoing internal wrestling match on the incipient eBook revolution, I've been researching the potential prizes and pitfalls of the current iteration of the phenomenon.  

The Defender... Awhile back, Newsweek Published this Op/Ed by Techie Geek Chic Jacob Weisberg In Defense Of the Kindle makes the argument that the Kindle - while clunky - is a step forward for struggling publishers and writers. He scores several good points regarding the inevitability of the e-book as a format and makes good mileage with his theme that "sure it stinks now, but do does every technology when it first comes out, be patient."

The ebook may well be inevitable. But is the Kindle?

A Kindle world is a world where your books are infinitely portable - as long as you don't lose your $400 Kindle reader. Your books don't belong to you, but you have a limited lease to read them, a very limited ability to loan them to others. I pick on the Kindle because it's the big fish and the easiest target, but this is a model that is propogating all over the place in various forms. The Sony eReader is much the same (also $400) a device that gives you access to a digital library of books that you can't really pass to the guy next to you on the airplane.  

Which brings us to our Challenger... Literary agent Michael Bourret wrote an interesting blog post at his agency's (DG) blog titled "Is Kindle a Danger To Ownership?" (He was apparently inspired by this article in the Christian Science Monitor.) Both Michael and CSM make a compelling case that our libraries are headed the way of our movies and music, down a road where the concept of "owning" a book you buy is a foreign concept and loaning a well-loved paperback to your friend is a thing of the past. Michael and CSM both point out that there is a middle ground, a path that does not take us down the Kindle road toward a third party claiming proprietary ownership of our libraries. A hybrid model where the purchase of a hardcopy comes with a free ebook version of the text is working for several publishers. A model that can reflect the current culture of a book as a possession, where the word-of-mouth can be accompanied by the load of a well-loved copy of the text. A loan that often leads to more sales for an author and a broadened fanbase.  

And then there's me... I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Kindle. To be honest, (aside from the price) the most significant drawback for me is the fact that you don't want to use an eReader in the bath tub or on a sandy beach. I like to read in circumstances that the eReaders of the world might consider "adverse conditions". My reading habits aside, I'm still torn on the whole thing. Like I said, the ebook might be inevitable, but the platform isn't necessarily. The idea of a world where we don't own the books we buy makes me intensely uncomfortable. As an avid collector of books, the very idea is anathema to me. I can come to terms with the idea that the ebook is an environmental necessity. That the forests of the world cannot support the creation of yet another mountain range of pulp paperbacks to match the ten or twenty the publishing industry has generated in the last hundred years or so. And with the written record of culture in the industrialized world growing exponentially, this is ever more true with each passing year.

Nevertheless, there are cross-platform formats available already which might mean we can avoid a Betamax-vs-VHS problem (and remember that the lesser of those two won that bout) between the Sony eReader and the Kindle and avert a future where the reader never feels that they own the book they hold in their hands. It's a future where recommending a new author or idea you just discovered to your friends necessitates either a broken law (or Terms of Use contract) or an immediate outlay of cash before they can see if you're right -- where such recommendations become less common thereby and word-of-mouth authors die on the vine.

In the snarl of Digital Rights Management and contracts and whathaveyou, the larger picture so often gets obscured... Whether it's ink or electrons, the growth or literary culture and the transmission of ideas depends largely upon the works belonging to the reader, not to the librarian.

---

Please let me know what you think of Kindle, the Sony eReader, and others as well as eBooks in general in the comments section.

Would you like fries with your Twilight?

In a recent interview, Newsweek tried to deconstruct what made David Baldacci's books so damned buoyant despite the weight of negative opinions from the likes of the Newsweek and the New York Times.

"The suggestion that reading a thriller is a kind of civic obligation is questionable, to say the least, and there are plenty of people who dispute that reading potboilers encourages an engagement with more-demanding texts. [...] Baldacci offers a break—and people who care about books should care about him. Whether or not thrillers are crucial for democracy, they are certainly crucial for publishers. Where a more literary book might be considered a success if it sells 50,000 in hardcover, a novel by a writer like Baldacci can sell more than a million." www.newsweek.com/

This is an interesting article, not so much because it's about Baldacci but because even though the alleged premise of the article (as expressed in the subtitle) as a sort of populist defense of the thriller as a genre "David Baldacci's 16 books were all bestsellers. Why do people have such a problem with that?"

The interviewer makes a number of statements that make it clear she's not entirely on-board with her (assigned?) premise.

Baldacci isnt alone in ascending the bestseller lists while the literati stand aside in frustrated amaze. Literature maven Harold Bloom's dismay at the popularity of JK Rowling and her boy wizard is nearly legendary. Stephen King himself once infamously likened his books to the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large order of fries. Tasty and momentarily satisfying, but not good for you in the long run.

One gets the impression from some authors that they are embarassed at thier status as the MacDonalds of the bookworld. But what really tends to get me is the distancing of the literati from the very thing that is keeping the industry alive. As they stand aside and decry the blockbuster model that is keeping the presses rolling and the bookstores open, they live under the same tent that is held aloft by the Davinci Codes and Prisoner of Azkaban.

The backlash against genre writers lives in a world that has forgotten that Shakespeare was the equivalent of a sitcom writer for his age. A quill-for-hire who transcended his genre to ascend the heights of historical figures whose very existence will be forever debated. So many of the great classics of our time were salvaged from the slushpile of history by a mixture of lucky happenstance and an author who didn't care what the critics of his or her time had to say and kept plugging away at the quill or typewriter or computer keyboard.

Will future generations see Baldacci as the Dostoevsky of our time? Perhaps not. Will Stephanie Meyer be looked upon by our literary heirs as the unheralded Jane Austen of our age? Not bloody likely. Nor will JK Rowling for that matter, though she might be our JM Barrie or EB White.

I'm constantly reminded as I read articles like the one in Newsweek what the always-pithy GK Chesterton said in an essay about detective fiction:

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."

I was working at the bookstore when the two biggest phenomena of recent eras began and ran their course. What is often forgotten is that JK Rowling's bestseller status was built upon word of mouth. Advanced Reading Copies were sent to booksellers and the story captured their imaginations. The strange little kids fantasy novel broke out as the booksellers recommended it over and over again to teacher and parent alike. I should have held onto my ARC of Sorceror's Stone. I still have my reader's copy of Davinci Code -- which is ironic since I enjoyed Rowling's little book and didn't so much care one way or the other about DC. Nevertheless, I was there when it came down the pipe and read it before most people.

My personal feelings about both books aside, it was almost amusing to watch as the esteem of the booksellers and literati who frequented my store waned in the face of growing commercial success. You can't be good and popular at the same time. That's just the way it is!

Both narratives have problems which I will discuss at another time. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series has similar flaws in the execution of the ideas to the point where I would put them on a descending scale with Rowling at the top, Dan Brown in the middle and Meyer at the bottom. Yet all three caught the crest of the wave, defied the dismay of their critics and built empires bolstered by their many imitators.

Are they good? That's not for me to say. There are better out there, for certain. But that doesn't invalidate the opinions of the masses. I'm not about to argue for market-driven literary criticism, but the pooh-poohing that happens every time Baldacci, King, Brown, Rowling and Meyer put a new book in the stores ignores a very germane element of their stories that undercuts the criticism: They're obviously telling stories that resonate -- stories we want to hear. Manifest in their sales data and the adherence of their fans.

As he was lambasting Stephanie Meyer as a hack, even King took a moment to point out that the strength of her books is the resonance of the stories she tells. Davinci Code, Harry Potter, and pick-your-thriller by Baldacci (or anyone else) all have one thing in common... they are all crafted from archetypal stories that resonate from a time when such tales were told to stave off the darkness that edged in from the corners of the wilderness beyond our firelight. Some of them are the tales told by the children at a campfire in the backyard, but those stories are simply smaller echoes of the greater tales being related at the fires of the grownups.

In the Newsweek interview, Baldacci suggested that reading thrillers was a democratic institution, a blow struck for literacy. The Newsweek interviewer sniffed at the very idea, but he was right. He was right because the more we tell stories, the greater our hunger grows for more. Every book put into the hands of someone who might not otherwise be willing to read one is a victory for literacy. I don't care what imprint the book has on the spine or who the author is, when people are reading, literacy wins. And one way or another, a literate nation will take care of the industry that feeds its need.

This doesn't necessarily mean we will always throw the greatest literary heroes up the bookcharts, but the taller and stronger the tentpoles that bolster the industry, the better chance the unheralded geniuses have of getting into the tent at all.