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    Better Read: A General Theory of Democracy, Literacy and Participation in America
    Better Read: A General Theory of Democracy, Literacy and Participation in America
    Better Read: A General Theory of Democracy, Literacy and Participation in America
    Ebook53 pages46 minutes

    Better Read: A General Theory of Democracy, Literacy and Participation in America

    By Paul Reidinger

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    About this ebook

    Amid a welter of movies, creative writing programs and Shakespeare- and Dickens-worship, is it still possible to read the old-fashioned way, for pleasure and enlightenment, for self and country? An American writer reads the signs of our times, from iPads to organic foods, and finds improbable cause for optimism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPaul Reidinger
    Release dateAug 14, 2012
    ISBN9781476490403
    Better Read: A General Theory of Democracy, Literacy and Participation in America
    Author

    Paul Reidinger

    Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

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      Book preview

      Better Read - Paul Reidinger

      Better Read:

      A General Theory of Literacy, Participation and Democracy

      By Paul Reidinger

      Published by Paul Reidinger at Smashwords.

      Copyright 2012 by Paul Reidinger

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Movies are Evil

      A Book is a Bad Houseguest

      The Invisible Reader

      Travel by Pages

      What Not to Read

      Down with Shakespeare!

      Eat, Read, Vote

      Preface

      It’s true, I want people to read. I particularly want younger people to read. I would urge them to read, except that young people maybe don’t like to be urged by older people. It’s too much like hectoring or the giving of unsolicited advice or other forms of social intimidation resting on the silent assumption that time brings authority if not wisdom and older people are more authoritative if not wiser.

      Older people probably are wiser on certain matters, some of them important, but we who are older are not morally superior because of such wisdom. We have simply lived longer and seen more and, if we’ve been paying attention, we might have begun to notice trends and tendencies. We have made more progress in the assembling of our life puzzles. There is hardly any point in getting older if you haven’t learned something along the way, if you haven’t made certain connections and begun to figure things out and share that info with those coming along behind you. Without this kind of transmission, human development will spin in a circle and we will be reinventing the wheel forevermore.

      Young minds are important, as every advertiser knows. Young minds are absorbent and molten; they can be influenced and shaped. This is why the arguments over what should be put into them, and who should be allowed to put it there, are so fierce. The stakes are high. Young minds will be around longer; for better or for worse, they will carry their early experiences and understandings far into the future. Advertisers know this, as do ideologues, whether in politics or the leafy groves of academe. I am neither an advertiser nor an ideologue, and I escaped the groves of academe long ago; I am merely a writer – which is to say, I am a reader.

      You might think that a writer who pleads for people to read is just another tiresome hustler whose self-interest is artless and predictable. Writers are subject to fits of megalomania, in my experience, and they very easily can be induced into obsessing about sales figures, print runs, reviews and other such indicia of popularity, reputation and fame.

      But the truth is that, for those persons interested in making a lot of money or even making a living, being a writer is at the very bottom of the list of ways of being successful. Only a handful of writers make more than pocket change through their prose, and these are often bad writers like Norman Mailer, the Henry VIII of American letters, who kept marrying and divorcing women but, because he could not send them to the Tower or have their heads chopped off, had to pay them alimony, which he could only get by ransoming himself to publishers’ advances. In this way, a prodigious quantity of bad work was produced and taken seriously; the forests suffered.

      But I come not to point out that Norman Mailer was a bad writer, nor even to suggest that people should read for the benefit of writers. They should read for the benefit of themselves – and not themselves merely as individuals but as members of a culture, a society, a body politic. I preach the gospel of enlightened self-interest. In a system like ours in which we the people are expected to govern ourselves, the

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