Sunday, May 31, 2009

If anyone out there would like to lament that no one reads books anymore, my feet beg to differ with you.

As of this writing I've spent one day on the job working the circulation desk at the Key West branch of the Monroe County Library and my feet are killing me. I was on them all day, checking books in, checking them out, putting them in boxes to send to the other library branches, putting them on carts, putting them on shelves, sorting the donated books, bringing them in from the book drop.

There was also a fair amount of handling DVDs. But truly, the number of books that moves through that place is astounding. And this is on a day that my co-workers assured me was quiet. In the off-season.

If you follow the publishing industry trade news, you probably think we're in the middle of the literary apocalypse. Book sales are falling! People are reading Facebook posts and Twitter tweets and text messages, not books! EReaders and cell phones are the horsemen of this apocalypse! In literary terms, you'd think we're Pompeii right about the time Vesuvius starts rumbling.

I disagree. And it's not just because of library usage (which besides my sore feet, I can back up with real numbers courtesy of the stat-happy habits of librarians -- to give one small example, in the month of April alone more than 13,000 items circulated at the Key West library -- a 12 percent increase over the year before).

Even without looking at the carefully gathered numbers, I know people read books because I do, and my friends do, and the hundreds of people who pay big money to attend the Key West Literary Seminar do, and the hundreds of thousands of people who attend the Miami Book Fair do. Not to mention the people who support three, count 'em, three, independent bookstores and one chain bookstore in a town of 25,000.

It's true, the publishing industry has some issues (though compared with the newspaper industry it's a minor apocalypse -- book sales are down a bit, newspaper subscriptions and revenues have plummeted). We are, when it comes to the printed word, without doubt in a period of major transition. People are getting their information differently, especially the information they need fast or want to be especially current. Publishing houses, instead of being boutique businesses born out of their founders' love and content to amble along on a small profit, are cogs in big corporate conglomerates that demand high profit margins. This is upsetting, especially if you work in the industry or value its product.

But I refuse to wallow in the slough of negativity, the "kids today" curmudgeonly attitude of deciding that just because habits are changing and the industry has painted itself into a bit of a corner, everything is ruined and everyone is stupid and everyone would be happy if we could only roll back the clock a couple decades. Things are different, true, and your kid probably is more interested in Hannah Montana or manga than Nancy Drew. Get the hell over it. (Speaking of changing standards, when my grandmother was a librarian, she refused to stock Nancy Drew and her ilk in her library, on the basis that those books were written by companies, not people, and therefore did not really qualify as books.)

Every new technology has been declared the Death of Literature, from radio and movies to television and videotape. Yet publishing persists. New writers emerge and tell stories in ways that no one ever dreamed of.

Fifteen years ago, if you'd told me that I'd be reading what are, essentially, comic books as serious literary works I'd have told you to go back to your mother's basement and keep working on your mimeographed 'zine. But "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel is hands-down the best, most compelling memoir I've read in years -- and who knows how many devoted readers "Watchmen" has created? I don't know if I'll ever get around to reading "The Iliad" -- and I am a reading-besotted former English major, mind you -- but I am experiencing the Trojan War with each new installment of Eric Shanower's epic series "The Bronze Age."

The reason literature survives is simple: Humans crave stories. We need narrative to make sense of the world around us, and we like drama for entertainment, instruction and maybe the good old human impulse of learning that someone else out there is suffering more than we are -- or that happy endings are possible, even if they're in fairy tales or implausible romances with ridiculous covers.

Homer, the Bible, Icelandic sagas and Native American oral traditions -- all of these come from somewhere. They come from the human mind and its overwhelming desire to make stories. That's not going to be extinguished by a little piece of plastic like a Kindle or an iPhone.

Instead we adapt the new technology to our needs -- and that's OK. In Japan, cell phone novels are big. Great! Television series have replaced live theater as the culture's pre-eminent dramatic form. I'm cool with that. I'd put your basic HBO series up against your basic Off-Broadway play any old time. (OK, maybe not "John From Cincinnati.")

Libraries have changed a lot since I was a kid, even since I was in college in the 1980s. They have computers and audiobooks (in several formats). They have movies on DVD. The catalog comes on a screen, not in a drawer. But they still have books. Lots of them. And people still read them. Lots of them.

The fear that new technology brings is that it will push the old stuff aside. Sometimes it does. Every minute I spend on Facebook I'm not reading The New Yorker, right? But I'm also connecting with old friends and even (gasp) sharing what we're reading, offering suggestions to each other, creating and comparing and commenting on lists of our top five candidates for best and worst books of all time. On the Internet, I'm finding blogs by really smart, interesting people all over the country who love reading and report back on what they think. The Web site LibraryThing is an amazing source of reviews, suggestions and information about books -- and lucky us, it's even integrated into the catalog of the Monroe County Public Library, offering recommendations and suggestions for similar books in the collection, even if that book is in Key Largo -- can't do that with a card catalog! With a card from Florida Keys Community College, you can request a book from the collection of any community college in the state of Florida -- without leaving your house. I shudder when I imagine what interlibrary loan must have been like pre-Web.

Life is indeed full of distractions and to read a lot you have to make a commitment to do so. Sort of like exercising or eating right but, in my view, easier and more fun. I have a laptop and a cell phone and a DVD player and an iPod and a Kindle. In April, I read (or finished, a couple I had started reading earlier) 10 books.

It took about a decade but I have come to prefer summer around here. Sure, you don't want to move around much outside between, say, 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. But life feels less frenetic -- it's easier to park or go to the grocery store or get a seat at the bar at the Parrot. You don't have a social obligation four nights of every week. It's kind of like winter up north, only instead of huddling by the heater I move my chair into the shade on the deck or crank up the air conditioner and read.

You should, too. Actually, chances are pretty good you already do.

Summer Reading

Recommendations

These are actually plain old recommendations but since it's the beginning of summer and summer reading lists are a thing, here are some books I have read recently and can heartily recommend -- it's heavy on the historical fiction, for which I blame my own proclivities plus the Key West Literary Seminar. All of them qualify as brain candy.

"Stone's Fall" by Iain Pears -- This is a brand new novel, from the author of "The Instance of the Fingerpost." It's historical fiction with a mystery at its heart -- why did financier and industrialist Julius Stone take a header out of his living room window? It proceeds in several chunks with different narrators, heading back through time, from post-World War II Paris to Venice in 1867. Long but absorbing.

"Martyr" by Rory Clement -- Another new one, by an English journalist turned novelist. This is historical fiction set during the reign of Eliza-beth I and uses an older brother of William Shakes-peare, named John, as its protagonist, a sort of Renaissance detective in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham. If you are a fan of Philippa Gregory, Jean Plaidy or other fictions set in this time period, this is a worthy addition with more attention paid to ordinary people caught up in the religious wars than the machinations of royalty.

"The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" by Kate Summer-scale -- Another work set in the past, this one nonfiction. It's about a murder that takes place in an upper-class home -- the murder of a small child -- and the London detective who arrives to solve the case. Summerscale skillfully blends the shocking story itself as well as the social milieu in which it happened (Victorian England) and the literary influences Whicher and the case had (the birth of the detective novel).

"The Lost City of Z" by David Grann -- In 1925, Sir Percy Fawcett set off into the Amazon looking for the fabled South American city usually called El Dorado but known in his journals and letters simply as Z. His companions were his young son and the son's friend, neither of whom had any experience in that environment. They never returned. Fawcett's obsession, and the quest to find out what happened to him, are parallel tracks in this book and Grann himself ventures into the still-hostile environment. His conclusions are surprising and surprisingly persuasive.

"The Book of Air and Sha-dows" by Michael Gruber -- I am not a Dan Brown fan but I'm fond of bibliothrillers -- page-turners with a rare book or manuscript at their heart -- and this is the best one I've found yet. The item at issue in this case is a lost Shakes-peare manuscript but it's Gruber's writing, and the voice of his protagonist -- a former Olympic weightlifter turned attorney -- that kept me enthralled.

"Blindspot" by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore -- Two eminent historians -- one a professor at Harvard the other at Tufts -- write a novel. Together. This sounds like it could have been a very bad idea. Instead, it's a ton of fun. Set in Boston a decade before the American Revolution, it is the story of a penniless Scottish painter and his apprentice, whom he believes to be a 16-year-old boy but who is actually the 21-year-old disgraced daughter of a prominent Boston family. What are the odds they'll fall in love? Told in alternating voices -- the painter's traditional first person picaresque novel, the apprentice's letters to a childhood friend -- it is a lusty romance but also deals with serious issues like gender, sexual orientation, race and political liberty. Not to mention art.

"His Majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik -- I can't believe I'm publicly admitting that I read and loved a book with dragons -- so I might as well admit I read and loved five books with dragons, all in the series called Temeraire (after, of course, our protagonist dragon). "His Majesty's Dragon" and its sequels are terrific. They are set in the Napoleonic Wars and are commonly described as "Patrick O'Brian with dragons." Alternate history, fantasy, call it what you will. But if you're at all interested, just give it a try. Here's a heresy for you: I think Novik is actually better than O'Brian at conveying the terrible carnage Napoleon wreaked across Europe, since so much of her books are set on land, as opposed to sea. Seriously, not counting Harry Potter I hadn't read anything with dragons in it since junior high. Now I'm counting the days until the next installment comes out in October.

"One Good Turn" by Kate Atkinson -- Actually you should probably start from the beginning of this trilogy, "Case Histories," which features former cop turned private detective Jackson Brodie. They're mysteries, with Brodie solving some puzzle or other usually with a couple of bodies along the way, but they truly excel as character studies and Atkinson is a fabulous writer -- funny and humane and totally original. Her first novel won the Whitbread Award, so she's got the literary chops -- and unlike some other literary types she doesn't feel compelled to adopt a pseudonym when she writes a crime novel that can be pigeonholed as genre work. The third in this series, by the way, is called "When Will There Be Good News?" I just listed OGT because it was my favorite, possibly because it's the first one I read.

"The Given Day" by Dennis Lehane -- Best known for crime novels like "Mystic River," Lehane swung for the fences in this epic historical novel, set in Boston in 1919 -- a time when World War I had just ended, the city was beset by fears of anarchist terrorism, influenza was wiping out populations. The book culminates in the Boston Police strike, a historic event, and takes in different parts of society, including Irish, Italian and African-American.

"Julie & Julia" by Julie Powell -- This memoir is about to come out as a movie, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, directed by Nora Ephron. So brace yourselves: It will be everywhere. Despite the fact that this book started out as a blog based on a gimmicky premise -- young New Yorker Julie Powell attempts to cook every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a year -- it's a fun, endearing read. And it's not just a blog committed to paper; it's a real memoir, chronicling love, family, society and the knotty problem of what to do when you're turning 30 and your original ambitions just aren't panning out.

Nancy Klingener is a library assistant at the Key West branch of the Monroe County Library and vice president of the Key West Literary Seminar. She blogs about books at www.boneislandbooks.wordpress.com.