Books I Got for Less than $10, or Why Are We Still Reading These Things?

From a View to a Death by Anthony Powell
Teleny, of The Reverse of the Medal by Oscar Wilde (?--et al.?)
The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth
The Consul's File by Paul Theroux
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potacki
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
Duo by Colette

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing an essay by George Orwell entitled "Are Books Too Dear?". Orwell was concerned that people, working class people primarily, were unwilling to spend money on books because they were perceived as a costly luxury. He disagreed, and went to some lengths to prove his point. Not that I imagine it did much good.

Just as back then and even more so today, there are libraries aplenty where you can find lots to read for the cost of--most of the time--nothing at all, except late fines. But I'd just like to point out that today, for about what even the least affluent make in an hour, I bought nine books (second hand, all of them, but none in bad condition).

Some people might say that it's easy if you have the kind of taste that can be satisfied by getting an early-70s Penguin classic for half of $3.50. There is some truth in this. But even the most recent mass market fiction, bought used, will be about $3.50 to $4.00, trade paperbacks around $7.00 to $8.00, and hardback fiction $10 to $15. And roughly speaking, the prices for those books bought new will be, respectively, less than $8.00, $15, and $25.

Let's think about these numbers in relationship to another form of relatively inexpensive entertainment, DVDs. A new DVD usually goes for somewhere between $20 and $30. Assuming the movie's running time is two hours, that's two hours of entertainment for about $25. Granted, there are often extras that some people enjoy watching, and somebody can always watch that movie again and again until it's too scratched or the technology becomes obsolete.  Even if you rent that new movie, it will cost about $5.00.

The average book (although this varies much more than is the case with movies) probably takes most people four to eight hours. I'm not going to try to point out any of the obvious extrapolations; anybody interested enough already sees the point.

All of this is, however, just a lot of hot air coming from a person who likes to read and views books not as some kind of unusual luxury but as a household good to be stocked. The fact is that most people just don't think about books this way. There used to be some validity, and there probably still is, to the truism that middle class people appreciated literature as much or more than most, partly because it was part of the culture that separated them from those below them and part of the process (in terms of education) that maintained them in their socio-economic position and might allow them to rise higher.

In a sense, books were necessary for a large portion of society, and reading and comprehending texts of some length was a skill and means of advancement and self-education. In our much more multimedia culture today, this is no longer as true, and this fact can be seen not just elsewhere but within books as they are published today--just pick up, if you don't like the rest of us already have one, a copy of one the For Dummies or Complete Idiot's Guide books.

I think that it's not too much to say that the changes alluded to above have made reading less relevant. That doesn't mean that reading is irrelevant, but it does mean that come of the emphasis put on it is probably anachronistic and even reactionary. The fact is that new horizons have opened up for new kinds of literacy, some of them more intuitive in their grammar (film, the Internet) than old-fashioned linear narratives of the type found in most books.

People who love reading have to wake up to two (relatively) new truths: reading isn't the act that it once was, because the forces that mould the history of civilization (whatever they are) have changed its context as much as the behavior viewed in isolation may appear the same; and this rather radical alteration has, in a sense, freed language and literature from many of it's former duties and responsibility.

I honestly don't know if Joyce could have written what he did before radio; I'm fairly sure there would be no Ballard without TV, no Burroughs without film. At least, if it weren't for these new visual media, I don't see why we would have been interested in even needed them as much.

Perhaps I go too far in that last paragraph, but I'm stepping onto that ledge because I know there are points to be made out there.