A few weeks ago, I left the ranks of the fifteen million Americans who work at night, happily saying goodbye to the swing shift I’ve held at the magazine for the past two years. There are things that I’ll miss—the peace of the office after nearly everyone’s gone home, for one—but I’m basically thrilled about it, partly because I can see my friends, but partly because I’ll be able to attend book events. I’ve spent the past two years whining about missing out on the readings held around the city every night. (Complaints include “But I write for a books blog!” and “Sometimes there’s wine!”) Whenever I have an early evening (or a reading’s scheduled for an odd time) I try to make it to at least one. But sometimes, when I’ve rushed downtown and snagged the last seat just as an author is taking the podium, I wonder why I’m trying so hard to get to these things. Half an hour later, when I’m surreptitiously checking the time and the reader’s rounding out the first chapter in a quiet monotone, I ask myself the same question, but more emphatically.
And so do a lot of people—or at least the Observer’s Michael H. Miller and the host of readers and publishers he interviewed for a piece called “No One Cares About Your Reading.” It’s blunt and occasionally snarky and not particularly kind, but a lot of what he says is completely true. “Is it a coincidence that this is how parents get their children to go to sleep? It is a dark fate, indeed, the reading that drags on and on, where the only person who has lost interest more than the audience is the author, the room lost in a purgatory of pauses for laughter, met by awkward silences.”
Miller says that readings have become compulsory and are often treated as such: authors and audiences go through the motions, the former slogging through long passages from their novels, the latter listening politely (with neither group having much fun). “I’ve been saying this since I opened the store: the traditional reading format is broken,” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, tells him. Many publishing houses have given up on selling authors’ books at readings, hoping that events will foster the publicity and good will that eventually lead to book sales. There’s been a lot of chatter recently about bookstores charging admission for readings, but if people are shelling out at the door, a reading better be pretty damn entertaining. “I think you have to have a great events programming and charge later,” McNally says. “I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s getting there.”
Perhaps it’s time to jump in and defend the writers here. The best reading I’ve been to in recent months was one of our own, “Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups,” hosted in conjunction with and at the New York Public Library. Three short stories from the magazine—by Tobias Wolff, ZZ Packer, and Roddy Doyle—read by three professional actors, David Hyde Pierce, Anika Noni Rose, and Gabriel Byrne. Their performances were fantastic, but they were just that: performances, readings by professional actors, trained and practiced in the art of saying words out loud. Should we ask as much from the writers themselves? Miller names a few who are trying a bit harder—Colm Tóibin trained with an actor to nail his delivery—and talks about Charles Dickens, who set the bar for reading one’s work aloud fairly high. But what about all of those writers who will never be good readers, those who are hopelessly shy, those who can say anything on paper but get tongue-tied behind a microphone?
I’d like to propose making the “Bedtime Stories” model standard for everyday readings (and no, not just because it was a New Yorker event, but still). McNally says bookstores are gravitating towards other formats—Q. & A.s, conversations with writers, etc.—but if you want to sell me on a book, I want to hear the book itself read well. So why not ask an actor? There are millions of them in this city, right? Going to a bookstore and hearing a great book read aloud is a privilege—it should never feel like an obligation. And if an event is entertaining enough to charge admission, everyone wins: the writer, the audience, and the (formerly unemployed) actor making the whole thing a joy to listen to.
