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Here's a collection of essays about reading and writing in which one of the writers urges readers to watch TV.
Better summon the National Endowment for the Arts, which a year ago issued an ominous report, Reading at Risk, about a decline in literary reading.
The usual suspects were rounded up, including TV, video games and other forms of new media.
But critic Kevin Smokler objected to the collective reaction that viewed the report as a "national emergency and the solution as a tsktsk."
In the introduction to Bookmark Now, he asks: "Were we simply a country of morons fulfilling our insipid destiny? Could we blame sexier, flashier media options with which the humble book couldn't compete?"
He finds those are "pat, elitist answers to a complex problem, and America's reading public, however big or small, deserves better."
Smokler delivers just that as the editor of this provocative, irreverent and optimistic collection of essays by 24 young writers. They have come of age in the digital era but remain passionate about books as well as blogs and websites. They take on the publishing industry and public radio, both of which are considered to be taking themselves too seriously.
Benjamin Nugent offers the literary heresy about watching TV. He notes that while people are working more and more, young novelists are writing less and less about real jobs.
The public "displays an appetite for stories about work. Look at television (if you're reading this book it's possible that you would benefit from watching more television.)"
You won't find advice like that in the NEA report.
Tara Bray Smith describes reading with a pen in her hand, "as if the author and I were in a conversation. Ha! I wrote. Wow, Gosh, No!" Talk about an interactive medium.
Christian Bauman discovered the joys of reading and writing as an Army private in Somalia a decade ago. He attacks those "who claim to own language and literature the way political conservatives now claim to own patriotism."
His lesson learned out of school: "The world of reading truly opens in your twenties. Smart kids can get a lot out of books ... but you don't really get it until you've had to crawl through the mud a few times. Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers."
The essays in Bookmark Now offer more questions than answers about what we read and why and how, but they should trigger conversations.
Smokler asks, "If online reading was eating away at book reading, how did we explain literary web-logs that commanded thousands of readers a day?"
And, "if young people were reading less than any other demographic group, how did we dismiss the revolution in young adult literature brought on by J.K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket, or the best-selling careers of twenty-something favorites like David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith and Jonathan Foer?"
He also writes: "We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun. But look at how literature presents itself in public; then say loudly, 'Where the hell is the fun?'"
Some of it can be found in Bookmark Now.
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