by David Raney
I’ll admit it: I’m a word nerd. Books lean from stacks on my floor and bedside table; I read at coffee shops, on elevators, at red lights. Years ago a new neighbor mused, “I’m gonna have to get some books for all these shelves,” articulating a problem I’m not familiar with. Reading forty or fifty books a year isn’t crazy, but it’s a lot for a country where between a quarter and half of us don’t read even one. Not Harry Potter or a detective novel, not the Bible, not a single book.
Here’s a question: Does the idea of a short story vending machine seem delightful or insane?
(2019) Weary city workers will have a new way of passing the time on their commute once the UK’s first short-story vending machines are installed at Canary Wharf this week.
Dispensing one, three and five-minute stories free to passersby at the touch of a button, the vending machines already feature in locations and in the US, where Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola was such a fan he invested in the company and had a dispenser installed at his San Francisco restaurant, Cafe Zoetrope.
The notion was prompted by research showing that members of the British public weren’t finding the time to finish books. Some 36% had given up on at least one book in the last year, and 30% hadn’t finished one in over six months. It’s true in the U.S., too, where apparently 57% of books aren’t read to completion. Our phones provide the easiest villain. “I travel on the tube every single day and I see everybody buried in apps and games, or looking at old tweets,” says British author Anthony Horowitz, who contributed a story. “So the idea of using that little chunk of your day for something that entertains you, something which is, with a very small ‘l’, literature, is appealing.”
There’s certainly something to phone addiction, our mesmerizing little window on the world, and you’ve seen the numbers: we check our phones 150 times a day, phones cause 1.6 million wrecks a year, 44% of us fall asleep with our phones in our hands,.
But stats about screen time, like all stats based on surveys, call for a grain of salt. E-books, for example, make up a quarter of all book sales, and on average readers using a tablet read for longer than those reading print books. And it’s not all about phones anyway. The average American spends three hours a day watching TV, nearly ten times what they devote to reading for pleasure.
Sometimes that grain of salt could be a block. Recently, Constance Grady in Vox addressed the “national crisis” imbedded in the questionable statistic that women account for 80% of the fiction market in the U.S. (and Canada and Britain), leading to the conclusion that “men don’t read fiction.” As early as 1997 the New York Times was proffering this stat, which appeared in another Times article in December titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” But, Grady asks, “Do any of these sources ever cite any of these alleged multiple surveys? They do not.”
In any case, book sales tell us nothing about library visits. And more generally, as author Caleb Crain says, “It’s pretty much useless to ask how many books somebody read last year, because almost nobody remembers, and many exaggerate, to seem smarter.”
Horowitz’s reference to “small ‘l’ literature” made me wonder whether the exaggeration Crain points to, or competitive snobbery about how long one’s list is, springs from guilt about reading “just” for pleasure. And whether both owe something to academia.
You’d assume, for instance, that college graduates read more books than the less educated. But an astonishing 42% of college students — again, if you can believe the stats — will never read another book after they graduate. I was an English teacher in a former life, and I can only hope my students aren’t reflected proportionally in that. Copying my own favorite professors, I tried not to teach stories as intellectual mysteries approachable only by those with opaque critical vocabularies. I didn’t approach books as, to quote Wordsworth,
a dull and endless strife…
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things —
We murder to dissect.
In an essay called “On the Hatred of Literature,” Jon Baskin recalls a fellow student in college who accuses her professors of just that:
We had become English majors in the first place not because novels and poems told us interesting things about history or politics but because they made us feel less alone, captivated us with their beauty, helped us to better know ourselves and the world. The professors, as far as I can remember, responded politely: after all, the student was only a sophomore. She would learn.
“It is no secret,” Baskin adds, “that in contemporary America there are many people who hardly read at all…. It would be wrong to say such people hate literature, for one has to care about something to truly hate it.”
As kids, most of us love reading, but that tends to diminish steadily with age. Half of 6–8-year-olds, for instance, say they read five or more days a week and think reading books is both fun and important. This drops to one-third by age 9–11 and to just one in seven by the late teens. And while the vast majority of parents believe it’s important for young children to read books for fun, they’re much less likely to say so as kids grow up.
But young or old, in or out of school, it seems fair to ask: Why read fiction at all? If it’s for a simple diversion from real life, we can all use that. Is there a more lasting reason, though, to involve ourselves in the lives of people who don’t exist?
My father asked me that once at the dinner table while I was home for a holiday during graduate school. He was a smart, well-read man, not at all dismissive of my plans to teach literature, just genuinely curious. Why do we read the minds of people who never lived, doing things that never happened?
My answer, which I didn’t have then or for years afterward, tips the question on its end. True, fictional characters aren’t real, but neither is “real” life. Ask Irish novelist Keith Ridgway:
I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, of making things up. As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long.… What we actually live, what we actually experience with our senses and our nerves is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.
“Fiction,” Ridgway adds, “gives us everything — our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives.”
This can happen with historical writing, too, but even the best history can’t approach fiction’s level of empathy and projection. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, “Literature can overcome man’s unfortunate trait of learning only through his own experiences.”
In the end we’re all storytellers, whether it’s our day job or not. We can’t help it. And the way we recall our lives, loves and losses — childhood, our teens, our first job, our second marriage — changes over time as we do. What critic John Leonard says of a book is equally true of our personal story: “When we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.”
What we learn from fiction, I think, is how unfathomably different people are across years, miles and cultures, and at the same time how arrestingly — fathomably — alike. The Mayans had a word, yail, meaning both love and pain. For my money it could be every book’s title. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin once wrote, “but then you read.”
And when we do, we become not other people but ourselves. George Saunders thinks fiction makes us “empathize with people we don’t know, and if the storytelling is good enough, we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.” This made even more sense when I heard Saunders later describe his favorite stories as “complex and baffling and ambiguous.” I submit it would be hard to come up with a better description of humans.
Stories are simply how we organize our world, understand it, survive it. And if we can’t live without the stories we tell ourselves and others — our “survival manuals,” biologist E.O. Wilson calls them — we should try to stop thinking of books as childish diversions or capital-E education. “Life,” in the words of author Anne Lamott, “will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people. But books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.”
I would say this to my father at dinner tonight, if I could. In dreams I sometimes do.
David Raney is a writer and editor living near Greenville SC with his family and a 2-ton puppy called Oscar who comes up with his best ideas. His work has appeared in several dozen journals and has been listed in four editions of Best American Essays.
January House Literary Journal 
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