Question: Who is your favorite author?
Answer: Hold on, don’t answer just yet; think about it for a moment.
According to a recent survey, more than 89 million Americans DID NOT read a book in 2007 (US National Endowment for the Arts). Meantime, those who do read tend to focus on non fiction and how to books:
How to lose 50 pounds in 50 days?
How to become a millionaire in three months?
How to make a man commit?
How to make a woman orgasm?
How to win friends and influence people?
How to tell if a man is marriage material?
How to know who is going to win an election simply by looking at candidates’ height and age?
And then there is fiction. You know, those books that are not written in bullets. Then can not be summarized by Top 10 lists. When it comes to fiction, most Americans seek advice from the grand marshal herself Mrs. Oprah Winfrey, if you make it to her list, you are pretty much guaranteed a spot on the best seller list and there is nothing wrong with that. One occasion, she gets it absolutely right (and at times she did not).
So what do most Americans read? Well, there are those author giants such as J. K. Rowling, James Patterson, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz and Josephine Cox. Much like any local Wal-Mart store, these authors each dominate sales in their own genre. There is nothing particularly wrong with any of these authors. Most of them found the formula to America’s taste in literature (and pocketbooks) and have thus dominated top seller lists for years.
What scares me more than anything, however, are the millions of readers who never heard of the classics and by classics, I am not referring to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne.
I am referring to more contemporary authors; those authors who dared to piss off the corporate establishment and thus ended, at times, with the short end of the literary stick.
Take Charles Bukowski as an example. Charles Whom? You ask?
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet slash author who managed to publish dozens of books of poetry, short stories and fiction in his short seventy four years on this earth (mostly spent in LA bars). Thanks to the vision of John Martin and his Black Sparrow publication, Hank dedicated himself to sitting down and writing books (in addition to his love for the poem as he described it). The marriage between Black Sparrow and Bukowski proved magical and resulted in such great works of literature as Ham on Rye, Post Office, Women and Factotum. Bukowski whose work was largely inspired by such authors as John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Anton Chekhov has inspired a new generation of contemporary authors such as Guy Jacobs, Dan Fante and Tom Paine.
You would think that an author like Bukowski who wrote about getting laid, drinking heavily and under-advantaged fist fighting would attract the attention of those younger male readers who themselves are trying to accomplish much of what Hank Bukowski worked towards and yet, that is not the case.
I recently searched through Charles Bukowski groups on both Facebook and Myspace. There, I discovered that the majority of Bukowski fans came from such corners of the world as Turkey, Slovenia, France and Belgium. Most of them were women as well. This is not a big surprise. Women tend to read more than males, especially those under the age of twenty five (the guys are too busy with looking at online pornography, playing video games and jerking off).
There is much more to be written about the topic of literature and books. Although, most of us authors do somewhere, somehow acknowledge that writing and reading is a dying art (thank you media convergence). Still we do it because this is who we are and this is what we do.
For those of you who are wondering which books you should pick up next, here is a list of recommendations:
1. Sexus by Henry Miller
2. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
3. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
4. Ask the Dust by John Fante
5. Hard Boiled Men by Guy Jacobs
6. Straight Man by Richard Russo
7. Portnoy’s complaint by Philip Roth
8. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
That is all for today, get off of your computer and go read a book