Reading for Pleasure
Also: Lost French love letters from the 1750s, Sigrid Nunez’s “lockdown novel,” Anthony Hecht’s formalism, Italo Calvino at 100, and more.
In its annual “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” which was published a few weeks ago, the National Endowment for the Arts found that the number of adults who reported that they had read at least one book for pleasure decreased by 4.2% from 52.7% in 2017 to 48.5% in 2022. Here’s Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly digging into the details:
The decline in reading between 2017 and 2022 was nearly the same for men and women, and, as in previous years, more women than men read books last year (56.6% v. 40%). The report also found that fewer older readers reported reading a book in the 2021–2022 period than was the case five years earlier. The biggest decline came among 55-to-64-year-olds, where the percentage of those who had read a book fell from 53.6% in 2017 to 43.6%. The percentage of younger readers—those ages 18 to 34—who read at least one book for pleasure in the 12-month period held even.
Results were more discouraging when the report drilled down to look at adult reading patterns for novels and short stories. The study found that in the 2021–2022 span, the percentage of readers who read a novel or story fell to 37.6%, down four percentage points from 2017. Taking literature as a whole, which for the NEA includes novels, short stories, poetry, and plays, the decline in the share of men reading was more pronounced, down 5.7 percentage points from 2017, to 29.5%, while 49.2% of women read at least one piece of literature in 2022, down 3.3 percentage points from the previous study. “It is sobering to reflect that our stretches of isolation and self-quarantining were unaccompanied by a boom in reading novels or short stories,” the authors of the study wrote.
More:
Like many in publishing, Iyengar thought long-form reading might have increased during the pandemic, but the results of the survey did not bear that out. He said it’s possible that book sales rose early in the pandemic even as the number of readers fell because those who read bought even more books than they previously did. The survey found that in 2022, a plurality of readers reported reading three books in the past year, up from two in 2017, supporting that theory.
Another survey finding was that the percentage of adults who said they watched or listened to content about books or writers fell to 13.6% in 2022, from 19.1% in 2017. At the same time, adults turned to new digital options to view art exhibits, concerts, and other cultural phenomena in meaningful ways during the pandemic. This suggested to Iyengar that even when trapped indoors, people still had access to an array of digital entertainment opportunities, which might have discouraged nonreaders from turning to books.
I am a little surprised by this, too, but, of course, reading literature has always been a minority interest. Given this, that 30% of men and 50% of women reported reading a work of literature in the past year ain’t bad.
In other news Barbara Streisand’s new memoir is a whopping 992 pages long. How many people who buy it will finish it? It is apparently very “dishy.” Here’s a list in The Daily Beast of the most surprising bits: “Yes, it’s a beast of a book, but let’s be clear: If there’s anyone whose life warrants that kind of exhaustive chronicle, it’s Babs. Where else would you be able to find such thrilling tales of on-set drama and love affairs spanning six decades of fame as an EGOT-winning singer, actress, and director? Or read someone’s anecdotes about brushing shoulders with everyone from Nelson Mandela and Princess Diana to Bob Dylan and Beyoncé? Indeed, Streisand’s Bible-sized memoir is a treasure trove of stories and secrets that’s well worth the multi-day read. But if the curiosity is too much for you to bear, see some of the book’s best bits below.” Brittany Luse reviews it for NPR.
Spotify changes its royalty policy. Some musicians are not happy: “starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), they will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays. This is akin to a regressive tax – reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots.”
What was it like to live in pre-Revolutionary Paris? John Adamson reviews a “highly enjoyable” new book that attempts to “gauge the capital’s ‘temper’ in the four decades before the fall of the Bastille in 1789”:
Darnton chooses forty or so ‘happenings’ from the four decades before the French Revolution, each crisply recounted in chapters that rarely run to more than ten pages, and assesses what Parisians made of them. All the period’s great political événements are here: Louis XV’s calamitous foreign wars and the humiliating treaties that ended them; the repeated clashes between royal government and the Paris Parlement (the city’s hugely prestigious high court); the summoning of the Estates General and the fall of the Bastille. So too are the great cultural events of the age: we have the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Rousseau’s Emile and Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolerance (his plea for religious toleration), along with the performance of Beaumarchais’s hierarchy-subverting Mariage de Figaro – the great succès de scandale of the 1770s Parisian stage – and much else. Even the first public balloon flight over Paris in 1783, emphasising the boundless possibilities of science, finds its place on Darnton’s list.
Scandal also figures in more destructive forms: the ‘depredations’ of the royal treasury by the royal mistresses Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry; royal ministers with their hands in the till; skulduggery on the stock market; and the most labyrinthine scandal of them all, the Diamond Necklace Affair – the murky imbroglio of the 1780s that damningly associated Marie Antoinette with a greed for jewels, midnight trysts with a cardinal and an Italian necromancer who claimed to have attended the wedding feast at Cana.
In hands less adroit than Darnton’s, such a catalogue of events, all of them well known to historians, might have amounted to no more than a compilation of the ancien régime’s greatest hits. Where his book has something genuinely new to offer, however, is in delineating the conduits through which information about each of these various episodes came to lodge in the consciousness of Parisians. These conduits were numerous, ranging from smuggled French-language newspapers printed abroad to manuscript newssheets, gossip, graffiti and ribald songs.
Helen Andrews on Anthony Hecht’s formalism. It was, she writes, “Hecht’s subject as well as his method.”
Valerie Stivers reviews Sigrid Nunez’s “lockdown novel”:
Nunez isn’t a household name, but her work is prestigious in the most rarefied literary spheres. The Vulnerables is her ninth novel; her seventh, The Friend, won the National Book Award in 2018. Her memoir, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, recounts her relationship with Sontag while dating the legendary critic’s son, David Rieff, in the 1970s, when Nunez was one of three assistants to editor Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books. It is quite the pedigree and is matched by her achievements and her behind-the-scenes influence. Nunez was an autofiction pioneer, and she writes in a lyrical style defined by forming loose but provocative connections between subjects. These occur both on the overall narrative level and line by line. It is a deceptively difficult technique. Many writers attempt it, and few succeed as well as Nunez does.
The Vulnerables is a lacework of anecdote, recollection, and observation that uses Covid to explore vulnerability in all its guises, mostly human, but not entirely, since a parrot is a significant supporting character. A single passage might contain an anecdote about an editor’s opinion of Madonna, a joke about misused language, and two lines about flowers. They don’t seem linked, but if you squint, they become a light-handed meditation on the ways we define ourselves. The book’s narrator is a writer, like Nunez, who appears to be about Nunez’s age (in her 70s) and lives, as Nunez does, in New York. In the lingo of Covid, she is “a vulnerable,” and this becomes a metaphor for the many ways that is true—physically as an aging person, emotionally as a solitary person, and socially as she navigates her friend group and relationships. The wider atmosphere of the pandemic suggests our vulnerability as a civilization, which Nunez enhances with a drumbeat of foreboding on climate change. Writing and its role also play major parts in the book, and can be seen as another form of vulnerability.
All of this is delicately done but cumulatively feels frustrating. Nunez is often the woman of the moment, but perhaps not this one.
The Canadian-Indian Insta-poet Rupi Kaur has refused an invitation from the White House to celebrate Diwali because of the Biden administration’s support of the “current atrocities against Palestinians.”
Daniel Swift reviews the “fabulously dull” letters of Wilfred Owen: “In her preface to Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen Jane Potter writes that ‘Owen’s letters constitute his autobiography,’ and she notes his surprising sense of humor and ability to evoke place and characters. This is only partly correct, and the background to these letters is far odder than first appears. They were initially published in 1967 in an edition co-edited by Owen’s brother Harold, who confessed in his preface that he had taken the decision years earlier to censor the letters by painting over them in thick lines of India ink, and now he couldn’t work out what he had crossed out. ‘The intention was to remove trivial passages of domestic news,’ he claimed, but this wasn’t convincing even at the time. Of the 673 letters in this collected volume, 554 are to Owen’s mother. If this is his autobiography, it is centrally about his family relationships. The other challenge of the letters is that a great many of them are fabulously dull. The young Owen had nothing to say, and said it again and again to his mother.”
Philosophers and scientists have been trying to figure out consciousness for over 50 years now and have made almost no progress: “The core difficulty is that consciousness defies observation. You can’t look inside someone’s brain and see their feelings and experiences.”
Italo Calvino at 100: “The fictional worlds created by the Italian polymath Italo Calvino, who was born 100 years ago this month, attract adjectives not usually applied to serious literature. Puckish. Playful. Charming. But that is what you get with this author whose extraordinary intelligence never undermined his desire to entertain — to charm and disarm — the reader.”
The Wall Street Journal drops its bestseller list: “Paul Gigot, editorial page editor at the WSJ, said that the company’s contract with Circana expired, ‘and we are not renewing it.’ He added that all other aspects of the paper’s book coverage will ‘continue as usual.’”
Reading lost French love letters from the 1750s: “Sent between 1757-58 during the Seven Years War, the letters were mostly addressed to the crew of the Galatée warship, and the French postal administration forwarded them from port to port in hopes of reaching the sailors. But when the British Navy captured the Galatée in April 1758, French authorities forwarded the batch of letters to England. There they remained unopened for centuries, until the historian Renaud Morieux of the University of Cambridge discovered them in the digital inventory of Britain's National Archives. He checked out the box from the archives with no idea what he would find inside.”
Europe’s highest—and wildest—train ride: “Thick, heavy fog settled around our train as we trundled 2,000m above sea level along a serpentine track in the French Pyrenees. With little visibility ahead, there was a disorienting and quietly thrilling sense of uncertainty as the open-air Train d’Artouste – the highest narrow-gauge railway in Europe – rumbled daringly close to the mountain ledge and the vertiginous drop to the valley below. From my seat at the back of the train, I watched as the rail cars ahead disappeared into the clouds and mountain mist, making it difficult to anticipate the turns that swung us unexpectedly to the right one minute and then sharply to the left the next.”
I am a third of the way through the biography of Anthony Hecht. I ordered it based on the review you linked to here. I had never heard of Anthony Hecht, but I like biographies of people in the 20th century. I highly recommend the biography. I have nothing in common with Anthony Hecht, and yet this book pulls me into a real kinship with him, because it is well-written.