Trash

I've only willfully thrown out two books in my entire life. The first was sometimes in the early 80's, a paperback novel the rights to which had been purchased by a man for whom I worked, in the hopes of making a blockbuster independent film.

Basically, the plot was set somewhere in the Bahamas. It involved jewel thieves, spies, a man and a woman having an affair, a drug deal and--if I remember correctly--a kidnapping. It wasn't a long book, 300 pages perhaps, but it became obvious on page 292 that the author had no intention of resolving the various situations in which his characters were involved. So on page 297, he put all his folks--the kidnappers, thieves, and dealers, the spies and the lovers--in a restaurant. Then he blew up the restaurant's boiler. Everybody died.

This was not your standard deus ex machina. No, this was an act of terrible laziness on the part of everyone involved in the book's publication. The writer, editors, p.r. folks and bookstores simply decided to sell a piece of crap based on a title--the name of an island--and the hope that the book would not get reviewed.

I was so angry that I tore the book's covers off and mailed the circumcised edition back to the publishing house with an insulting note. When I told the film-maker that he had thrown away a couple of thousand dollars on something that wouldn't, couldn't, see the light of day, he got very upset, fired me and hired another writer. The movie was never made.

The second time I threw a book away was last week. In this particular case, the author relied on scientific gobbledygook to justify the existence of a bulletproof monster who was disemboweling the staff of a research station north of Alaska. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's been done. The Thing comes to mind, as do a few hundred other sci-fi/horror books published in the last 30 years. This was a terrible book because once again, the author was lazy. He'd had a success a year before with a remarkably similar plot set in Central America. That book was made into one of the worst movies of 2009 and it's obvious that he hopes his latest atrocity will be a repeat. Probably, it will.

Here's the rub. We've reached an interesting point in popular reading. The overwhelming majority of book buyers are no longer interested in having to think about what they're ingesting, hence the spate of truly meaningless books and the slow disappearance of what might be called meaningful literature. Again, there's no surprise here. What we come up against is the growth of instant gratification in pretty much everything: instant communication, instant response, instant decision-making, instant anything. We've sped up the world and left very little up to the imagination, and we've Facebooked ourselves into an all-around lowest common denominator. It's sad, and it explains why--outside of romance writers--there are fewer novelists making a full-time living at their trade than there are professional football players.

Here's another interesting statistic: if you were to lump all the writers together and include everyone from the newsletter lady at the church to the professor seeking tenure to the immensely successful people like Amy Tan or Stephen King, the average annual income of a writer would be approximately $300. Under-read, underpaid.

There may be a dim light on the horizon. Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Nook and other electronic wonders may save our collective asses by providing yet another instant gratification: the instant book. No need to go to the store or to carry a weighty tome--an entire library is at your disposal for a minimal fee. So there. Start reading, there're no excuses left.