Some random thoughts on books
11 August 2026
The status of books in America today hovers between out-of-control production and irrelevance. There are probably more books being printed and published now than ever before. The ease of self-publishing, combined with the lack of literary gate keepers, produces a flood of new books every week—poetry, memoir, fiction, opinion, etc. Just send your manuscript to Amazon and they will make a book for you. Congratulations! You are a published author! Nobody will care if its good or not because almost nobody will pay attention to it.
However, the book still exists as a significant cultural item, a token, an advertisement, a sign of thoughtful engagement with the world. You can collect them like beer mugs or stuffed bears. Or not. Book readers like myself, used to build personal libraries, providing a history of interests as well as reference points. An old book on the shelf helps us remember, not only its contents, but also that phase of our intellectual life.
I still have my library of maybe 2000 books, spread between my apartment and my barn upstate. I’ve collected these over 50+ years, because once I read a book, I can’t get rid of it. It is like an old friend. Plus, I write notes in the margins. I somehow think these notes will be valuable in the future. But they never make sense when I read them later. But I still write them—because I want to be part of the conversation the book inspires, even if I’m really talking to myself. In some ways the library is a map of my intellectual travels and the conversations I had with myself. Even if I never actually reread anything.
Being a judgmental type of person, I always examine a people’s bookshelves when I visit their home. Many people have no such shelves. Some people have highly curated collections of books, designed to say “I am an interesting person”. In fact, these days you can hire a bookshelf curator who will design your book shelf for whatever effect you desire. There are even ready-made book shelf collections you can buy. At the absurd extreme of this trend, you can simply purchase a block of fake book spines, so that the titles are visible but there is no actual book attached.
Unfortunately, I am old now and I need to get rid of my books. Actually, I need to get rid of everything. I have no heirs or friends who might want my stuff. And it is time for my sadhu days, to wander freely without material or intellectual burdens. So, a couple of years ago I bought a Kindle so I wouldn’t have to carry books when I travel. I don’t mind reading on a Kindle. You can highlight passages and write notes, etc., but it’s not the same as a physical book—it’s difficult to backtrack or thumb through the pages casually, because, well, there are no pages and no book.
It’s also true that, like everyone else, my attention span has been ruined by technology and the distractions of modern life. I miss the days when I would sit for a couple hours at a time reading some engaging novel, or heavy tome of philosophy. The world was happening outside, but I was oblivious. Back then I had no computer in my pocket and no data waves passing through my body and brain. But now, the world imposes itself on our privacy, there’s no escape.
It’s also true that definitions have changed. Authors don’t have to be authors anymore—there are ghost writers for everybody, especially celebrities and sports stars, even for other authors. And, of course, there is AI, which can write our books for us. And readers don’t have to be readers anymore, either. In fact, reading had become a problem. There is an ongoing concern over this “problem of reading” in America. People just can’t do it anymore. It’s just too hard and no one has the time.
To some degree, technology has solved this “problem of reading” because now you can read without reading. In the US we are bombarded by ads for apps that make reading easy by getting rid of reading altogether. One of these apps is called Speechify. One ad shows a young man in a bookstore with a giant pile of books in his arms. A stranger asks him if he is going to read all those books, and he replies, “Of course! Its easy with Speechify—all I have to do is take a picture of the book and the app will read it to me. I can even pick a celebrity voice to read it!” He then demonstrates how Snoop Dogg can read the book for him. The young man then says “Who wouldn’t want to have Snoop Dog read a book for you.” Of course, he is not actually reading the book and neither is Snoop Dog, who is probably getting a hefty licensing fee for use of his AI voice. You can also increase the speed at which you listen to Snoop Dog read your chosen book, so that you don’t have to waste as much time reading.
When I was a literature professor, I was often shocked at how illiterate the college students were. Maybe this is just in the US, but many of them only had 6th grade reading and writing skills. They couldn’t read or write with any competence. But they were in college! And this was years before AI made the scene. The “problem of reading” goes way back.
Studies of American college students show that most students find it very difficult to read a whole book and so many teachers assign short excerpts. I knew one professor who dealt with the situation by assigning only one book for the entire semester, and they read it out loud in class. They didn’t have to take it home. Each student read a page or two. And at the end of the semester, they probably believed they had actually read the book.
The sad truth is they don’t even need to read, because they have AI to write their papers for them. And many professors now use AI to grade the papers. So, you have a situation in which the AI teacher is interacting with the AI student and neither the real student nor the real teacher needs to actually participate.
But books have another use. Amongst some young people today it is popular to pose with a real book as a fashion statement. You can see them riding the subway or sitting on a park bench holding a book. This is often a form of public performance, a kind of misguided nod to some fashionable primitivism. I remember a similar trend a couple decades ago when young Brooklyn hipsters would carry around actual typewriters and use them in coffee shops. This too was a performance of physicality, born from a misguided nostalgia for the physical world, even as that world disappears from our daily lives.
The truth is, that for most people books have become inconvenient physical objects, a piece of weight they have to deal with. I have on occasion offered to give someone a book, only to be met with a confused expression that seems to say, “What am I supposed to do with this?” They often politely refuse, with the excuse that they can’t or don’t want to “carry it” around, as if the book were a cross or a hunk of lead in their handbag.
As a writer of books, I am constantly aware that no one reads them. The other day I ran into an old friend who said:
“I still have one of your books.”
“Oh yeah, which one?” I asked.
“I think you told me it was about some guy in Chicago?”
I’m glad I was able to tell him what it was about. He won’t have to read it. But I don’t know why I keep doing this. Maybe if I just stopped, I could live a happy life.
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