The Reader

One night a week, I shelve books at our local library. It’s hard work, standing on a stool to lift things up to the top shelf and then bending down to the lowest one. Books can be heavy! But they are wonderful, a technology which has allowed us to share thoughts with people who lived as long as two thousand years ago. More if you count cuneiform tablets. (Glad I don’t have to shelve those!)

As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing. Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again. And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.

Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers. Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons, to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found. Everyone writes!

But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”

My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary, readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.