(14) Reading Crisis or Anxiety? Sunday Morning's Michael Enright interviews Marian Botsford Fraser, Lindsay Waters and Ben McNally, May 20, 2007

A couple of years ago, May 20, 2007, to be exact, I heard Michael Enright, CBC's distinguished Sunday Morning host, lead Marion Botsford Fraser, Ben McNally and Lindsay Waters in a fascinating discussion about books and reading.

Sunday Morning is my all-time weekend addiction. Everything stops till it's over. And while I listened to this particular show, I actually sat at my laptop and took notes! Read on. You won't want to miss the discussion.

Writer Marian Botsford Fraser's Requiem for My Brother was shortlisted for the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction, and winner of CBC's Northern Ontario Reads(http://www.marianbotsfordfraser.ca).

Lindsay Waters, author of Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (The University of Chicago Press, 2004, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=22847), maintains that the pressure to publish in the academic world is leading to the destruction of the "quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning," and to the destruction of those who participate in it.

Ben McNally is owner of Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street Toronto (Bay and Queen, http://www.benmcnallybooks.com), and host of the Globe and Mail/Ben McNally Brunch. The next one is scheduled for Sunday, February 8, 2009, 10:00 am, King Edward Hotel: Ana Siljak, author of Angel of Vengeance; Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History; Tim Cook, author of Shock Troops.

But wait - let's get back to the discussion with Enright.

Mr. Enright raised the interesting point that we're all under so much pressure to read these days that maybe we'd just rather watch TV. We rush to the bookstore to get the "Fifty Books You Must Read Before You Die."

Marian Botsford Fraser seemed to agree, adding that there's a type of "general anxiety, that there’s so much out there that we must be on top of it all. It's a great fallacy of our time – that we’ve Googled something, or we’ve read the Wikipedia entry that we’ve had the experience: it replaces the act of reading a book, rather than doing it; it’s on the screen, so we’ve done it. Anxiety that I’m so far behind, how am I going to do that – check out the New Yorker review to see what I’m missing."

Lindsay Waters commented that there's such a "pressure to increase the number of publications, that the actual content of the book doesn’t matter any more: if the book on my CV, it's just something that will be tabulated, the content doesn’t matter, the content is more distant from us."

Waters continued: "The anxiety about reading is yet another way of distancing us from another act. We want to speed everything up. We should slow down, otherwise we won’t enjoy reading. We need people pollinating from one brain to another, soul to another, psyche to another. If we don’t read slowly enough, this type of pollinating won’t take place."

What a fascinating take on reading. Can you see why I'm addicted to Enright's Sunday Morning?

Ben McNally added, "I can’t read quickly. I’ve always served a sophisticated clientele. People who come to my bookstore are looking for something different -- for enlightenment -- they don’t want to read a book like every other one. People are looking for value, rather than books that are disposable."

Marian Botsford Fraser: "There's a pressure to read the 'latest' – people want to because of this wash of info. out there. There's too much out there. My bedside table's disappeared under the volumes. 'What’s your summer reading, your beach reading? Do I have time for a huge book?' Because they’ve got too much to read."

Lindsay Waters: "I welcome this. As a publisher, I realize that we’re all looking for reasons not to read... We want to know that the world’s gotten bigger, better... But we’ve been burned many times by going out and reading something; don’t just listen to what Oprah tells you to read. What I’m going to take on my vacation takes us to the process of what’s at the heart of reading: up to page five, if it hasn’t grabbed me, I don't want to read it."

The point was also raised that we want to read books so we can go to a cocktail party and talk to someone we don’t know about a book we’ve read. Have you ever faked having read a book? I can't imagine that.

Michael Enright weighed in with a question: "Is there a book that you felt you had to read, but you couldn’t read it… Ulysses, or “Useless”. I’ve started that book 5,000 times…"

Alright, I must admit I'm guilty of that one.

Or what about, "Don't judge a book by its movie?"

"I dunno." But I think I'll stay addicted to reading...