In the Guardian’s theblogbooks, Jean Hannah Edelstein attacks “sizeism” in fiction and suggests that novellas might be the perfect antidote to the reading public’s (supposedly) declining attention span:

And then I had an epiphany: could it be that we should look to classics like Ethan Frome to find the key to saving fiction from the worrisome tides of publishing sturm and drang, the statistics that indicate that people distracted by the trillions of choices provided by digital media are giving up on fiction? Might the way to stop our atrophied attention spans becoming terminally distracted be to simply publish more short books?

I’m in favor of shorter books in the same way that I’m in favor of 100-minute movies and 3-minute pop songs–works of art are usually made better by some judicious cutting. But I suspect that novellas have never caught on for the same reason short stories are dying out: because so many people view reading as being more like homework than a hobby, if they are going to read, they want to feel as though they’ve “accomplished something.”

Simon Dumenco wittily dismisses Steve Jobs’ dis of the reading public (”The Written Word? It’s So Totally Over, According to Mr. IPod,” Advertising Age)–but that still doesn’t change the fact that, riding the bus last Friday, I was sandwiched between two guys watching TV on their iPods.

As for Jobs’ stat, it seems he extrapolated it from an old National Endowment for the Arts study, which found that in 2002, just 57% of American adults reported reading a book. Then again, according to an Associated Press-Ipson poll released last August, 27% of American adults read no books last year — ergo, nearly three-quarters did. In fact, the poll revealed that the “typical American adult” read four books last year.

“Who are these ‘people’ to whom Steve Jobs is referring?” Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief Sara Nelson asked me last week. “Not the million-ish who are devouring Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ or the ones who line up for Harry Potter and/or James Patterson novels.” She added: “All I can say is that when I sat in restaurants and airports or on buses or trains and pulled out my Kindle, I got more attention than if I’d shown up naked — with an adorable puppy.”

At this point you should type “Sara Nelson naked with an adorable puppy” into Google Image Search.

To save yourself the typing time, click here.

And, because it’s Friday, The Onion:

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

GREENWOOD, IN - Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

(Thanks, Carlos!)

In Wired, Clive Thompson calls science fiction–or, if you prefer, speculative fiction–”the last great literature of ideas.” And he makes his case in a language appropriate to the venue:

Here’s my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times - writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life - eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality - and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds - so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

He makes a great, provocative argument. And though he cites some oft-cited examples of “literary” authors working in sf (Roth, McCarthy, Chabon, Lethem, Atwood), he’s also right on the money when he talks about why the genre gets “short shrift” from “serious” readers:

Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors - like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick - have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

And a few generations’ worth of nerd stereotypes aren’t easily overcome, either.

My favorite line comes at the end of this paragraph:

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender’s Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

I’m on deadline today for my review of the new C. J. Box novel, Blood Trail (Putnam). A couple of years ago, I complained that Mr. Box had deprived me of a good night’s sleep. At the time, I’d just returned from spending three months at home with my first son, and the readjustment to business hours was proving rocky.

Well, Box did it again on Wednesday night. And, with a second son who’s–how do I say this politely?–slumber-challenged, I could still use the shut-eye. But I defy anyone to get within 50 pages of the end of a Box novel and just stop, no matter how scratchy their eyes are.

Despite the number of terrific books that I’ve been fortunate enough to review for Booklist, it’s pretty rare when I find that I can’t stop reading one of them. Books have become my job, and no matter how much I enjoy my work, I know that there will be more good stuff coming my way soon. So when I simply cannot close the book, that tells me one thing for certain: it’s going to get a starred review.

I will say that Blood Trail isn’t quite as good as the last Pickett, Free Fire, or my favorite, Out of Range, but given that Box is now on the two-books-a-year plan (”amateur,” scoff Ken Bruen and Walter Mosley), it’s remarkable how close he is to those benchmarks. Box’s other book out this year was the terrific Blue Heaven (St. Martin’s/Minotaur), which I approached with some trepidation only because it seemed to signal an effort to make the Wyoming author more mainstream (they photographed him without his cowboy hat, for example). But that was a needless worry. Box has proved that he can branch out with stand-alone thrillers while keeping his large core audience (Pickettheads? Romanowskians? Boxovites?) happy.

Come to think of it, my only quibble with Blood Trail is probably that it’s a bit shorter than usual–in which case, I shouldn’t be complaining. Because then I’d really be short of sleep.

Indefatigable American Libraries editor Dan Kraus has just finished another video for AL Focus–with the focus this time on Booklist editors. Every January, editor-in-chief Bill Ott solicits our favorite personal reading for his Back Page column (”Reading for Fun“). And this year, Dan got a few of us to talk about it on camera. I’m sure that, watching the fruit of his labors, Dan is thinking that he may as well quit–whether because he’ll never be able to best this masterpiece or for some other mysterious reason (hey, we tried to be brief), only he knows for sure.

Watch it here.

(Why is the video not embedded? Take it up with WordPress. I keep meaning to and never getting around to it.)

I’ve been enjoying the posts at Book Group Buzz. Yesterday, Misha Stone’s “When Fiction and Reality Collide” addressed–well, you’re probably one step ahead of me on that one. Says Stone:

As a Fiction Librarian, I often get a little annoyed when patrons distinguish the difference between fiction and non-fiction as "fake" versus "real."

As a fiction reviewer, writer, and made-up person, I, too, get annoyed when I meet someone (usually at a cocktail party where the non-profit and for-profit worlds collide) who informs me that they don’t like to read novels because they like to “learn things.” Nothing wrong with simply preferring nonfiction to fiction, of course, but those who dismiss fiction out-of-hand usually strike me as being people who don’t know what to do with the facts they have. Facts are important, but what good are facts without insight? Fiction plays free with the facts in order to investigate even deeper matters.

This topic must be in the Booklist zeitgeist, as Joyce Saricks’ soon-to-be-published column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read,” confirms. She begins:

A few months ago, I came across a comment that got me thinking: readers read nonfiction to learn something. Though seemingly innocuous, the remark, in context, implied that one doesn’t learn from fiction. I confess it got my dander up: Is nonfiction essentially superior because it offers information, the opportunity to learn something? And is it true that we don’t learn from fiction? 

How does she conclude? I’ll add a link on Monday, when her column goes live, so you can read for yourself.

This is all to say nothing of the real-versus-fake issue facing memoir, about which enough has been said already to last us until 2009.

(Unless I think of something really, really clever. Then I won’t be able to help myself.)

Update: Here’s the link to Joyce Saricks’ latest column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read.”

As the new year approaches, it’s a good time for stock-taking. And with the holidays upon us, it’s a good time for thinking melancholy thoughts. So here you go:

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special "reading class," much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become "an increasingly arcane hobby."

Yes, there’s a lot of deep stuff about the “antagonism between words and moving images,” but many of us started getting depressed the moment we saw the title of Caleb Crain’s New Yorker article: “Twilight of the Books.”

(If, as may be surmised by the research, you have neither the time nor the inclination to read the whole thing, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: get rid of your TV, although you can keep your PC–but no YouTube.)