The end: Bookstore’s closing reflects the decline of reading

The recent closing of the Book Mark downtown is saddening because bookstores make a community’s Main Street and collective brain stronger.
The store’s closing is not only an example of our sour economic times, but illustrates the waning of reading culture.
When’s the last time you read a book? When’s the last time you bought a book? When was the last time you bought something from the Book Mark?
I’ve only been in Manistee a few months now and can safely say I’ve been in there a dozen times and made several purchases.
In a 1997 interview in The New Yorker, one of my favorite novelists, Philip Roth, lamented to editor David Remnick that, “Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced.”
Roth isn’t just being crotchety about the fact that less and less people are consuming the product he makes, he’s upset over a shift in culture. Roth in his late seventies, remembers a time when books, both fiction and nonfiction, were part of a national dialogue, before reading became an activity along the lines of eating your broccoli and getting exercise.
My grandfather was a housepainter raised in the rural South who moved to Detroit after serving in the Navy during World War II. He didn’t go to college, but having books in the house was very important to him. I read about the exploits of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from volumes in his complete library of Mark Twain. When you flipped over the hardcover, it read: “From the Library of Basil Counts.”
From the beginning of the 20th Century until recently, it was with pride that a household had a small library.
Now, most homes you go into have towers of CDs and DVDs piled high in the living room.
What we’ve forgotten in that time is that literature is at the raw, white hot core of humankind.
Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, or Roth himself?
The first chapter of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” would make a sailor blush.
I can feel you, dear reader, rushing to your computer to see if Google produces a sample of the first couple pages so you can find out if it’s as raunchy as I’m hinting.
Shame on you. Go buy the book.
But this column is not a praise of dirty books; it’s a rant against a culture that ignores all books. The great complaint about reading is, “I just don’t have the time.”
That’s funny, because television and Internet usage keep going up. What are you really doing with your time, America?
The real complaint I’d like to hear, the more honest complaint, would be, “Reading is difficult.”
Yes, it is. It takes time and devotion in a day and age when no one can pull themselves away from the television, video game or computer screen. But to let the dust collect on books and for us to stay glued to those screens is detrimental to our civilization.
The more people read, the more complex thoughts they’re able to have and the more just society we create for ourselves. Reading forces you to empathize with characters, whether real or fictional; the next step is to empathize with real people.
Without books, we don’t even know what words like “pride” mean. Definitions of words lose nuance, erode, and become caricatures of what they once were.
Speaking of definitions, a quick clarification on what I mean by “books.” I don’t mean vapid slime that trickles down from the mass media, whether it be Glenn Beck or Stephan Colbert. You may as well watch the television shows these commentators are on.
For American studies, I always go back to Huck Finn and Jim on the mighty Mississippi. If you’re interested, I’m sure the Book Mark has a copy and maybe you can get there before it shuts down for good.
Beware, it may take more than fifteen minutes to read and you might just miss the next episode of American Idol.