I’m thinking I’d like to talk this week about a subject that tends to be somewhat neglected in public discourse these days: books. As I understand it, there was a time in America — probably that fabled mid-century period following World War II and preceding Watergate, when architecture was googie and kids still respected their elders — when books were the major driving force of our popular culture, not movies or television or the as-yet-uninvented Internet. The controversies that office workers debated around the water cooler, the fictional characters that everyone knew and loved like their own flesh-and-blood friends, originated on the printed page, not the silver screen. I think it’s pretty obvious that those days are far past us now. It isn’t that books are irrelevant or that people don’t read anymore — I personally believe those claims are overhyped and just a tad hysterical, and if you don’t believe me, walk down to your local Barnes and Noble store sometime and ask yourself how this place could stay in business if people were no longer reading — but the cultural emphasis has definitely shifted away from the oldest of our media. Where once the movie version of a best-seller was considered the spin-off product, now it’s more like the pay-off that everyone is really interested in. The book often seem to serve as a warm-up for the featured act. Further, the movie is most likely the version that will be remembered in the future — do you know anyone who’s actually read The Godfather? I didn’t think so. The book has become the ancillary product now.

I’m as guilty of contributing to and participating in this shift as anyone. I used to think of myself as a pretty literary guy, but I’ve recently come to realize that I’m probably not as much of a tweed-and-elbow-patches sort as I’ve always imagined. I read a great deal, and books do matter to me, but looking back, it’s obvious to me that the stuff that really influenced me as I was growing up and which matters the most to me now almost all came from the visual media: movies and TV. I’m somewhat embarassed to admit this, because movies and TV don’t have the same respectability as print fiction, and because it clashes with my long-held sense of identity, but it is an inescapable conclusion. Whereas certain of my friends talk about the way they turned to their Tolkien paperbacks to soothe their adolescent angst, I tended to pop in my tape of Star Wars after a rough day at school, or I’d tune into Star Trek or a host of other television series. It’s not that I didn’t read as a kid — indeed, I read voraciously throughout my childhood and adolescence, and I do remember certain characters and stories with a great deal of fondness. But the stories and characters that have really stayed with me, aside from a handful of exceptions, were born of the moving image, not the static word.

(The great irony here is that I’ve always wanted to write novels for a living. Go figure.)

Nevertheless, I believe books are important and I also believe we’ve lost something by allowing their role in society to atrophy (although I haven’t quite worked out what it is we have lost…). So, in a token effort at holding back the relentless advance of barbarism, I’m going to devote my blogging energies for the next little while to the subject of books: what I’m reading, what I’m buying, and what I’m seeing in the news and on the InterWebs. Hope you all enjoy the change of pace…