When NEA chairman Dana Gioia recently announced the distressing results culled from a comprehensive survey of American literary reading habits, he singled out the statistic that less than half of the American population over the age of 18 now read fiction, poetry or plays. "Indeed, at the current rate of loss," the report concluded, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."
The Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt., where I have worked as a bookseller and buyer for 12 years, has just completed a major expansion in the past year, doubling in size and adding a cafe. That is a considerable investment in the future of reading in light of the NEA's bleak prediction.
Where do we find the optimism to pursue such a course? The at once simple and complex answer is, as it has always been for booksellers, one book and one reader at a time. A recent example is Ingrid Hill's first novel Ursula, Under (Algonquin), which has had a quiet birth nationally so far, with few major reviews and no expensive advertising campaign. Yet, just one week after the NEA report was released, Ursula actually surpassed Bill Clinton's megamarketed bestseller, My Life, in total sales at our bookstore.
Something important is missing from the NEA report, something crucial. Finding readers isn't just about big problems and big solutions; it's also about small victories that perhaps aren't so small.
Ursula's Northshire success story began when Shannon Ravenel, the respected fiction editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, called last February to ask if I would take a look at an advance reader's edition of a particular first novel.
"I called you because Craig [Popelars, director of marketing] and I know that you like the challenge of truly original fiction and because I hoped I could talk you into reading a first novel we think belongs in that category," Ravenel said. "We were sure we had something special, but also something so different that we had no clear comparisons to offer booksellers. So we called you—and a handful of others we know who look out for great fiction—with the hope that you'd be tempted to read the galley."
I fell in love with this marvelous tale that begins when a two-year-old girl named Ursula Wong falls down an abandoned mine shaft—"like a penny into the slot of a bank, gone"—on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The ensuing rescue operation, replete with media frenzy and private family crises, forms the core of the novel, but Ursula's peril is only the beginning. Chapter two whisks us back to the second century B.C. world of Qin Lao, a Chinese alchemist who is the little girl's ancestor on her father's side and the first in a succession of Chinese and Finnish forebears we will meet as we thread our way from present to past and back, again and again.
Ursula, Under turned out to be a temptation few of us at the Northshire could resist. Two months before the novel's publication date, we were already taking special orders from people who'd overheard us talking about the book on the sales floor. By the time copies arrived in the store, we had also scheduled a reading and published an interview with Hill in our summer newsletter, "The Northshire Independent." In addition, Book Sense chose my recommendation of the novel for its June "We Also Recommend" list.
Primarily, however, we found readers for Ursula, Under the way good booksellers all over the world find readers: we talked to one another and we shared our enthusiasm with our customers. Now people come into the bookstore every day asking about "that book where the little girl gets trapped that everybody's reading."
Maybe fewer people are reading literature now; maybe the sky is falling. How do we solve the problem? I don't know, but I think we should work harder to inspire and nurture the readers we still have instead of helplessly mourning the ones we've lost. This year, one small solution began with a writer crafting an irresistible novel, an editor picking up the phone, booksellers evangelizing and readers conversing. It's the best pyramid scheme going.
