REDISCOVERING THE JOY OF TEXT

By Walter Kirn

Reading is a lot like sex. People who rarely read can feel abnormal. People who read all the time can feel abnormal. And because so much reading is done in private, behind closed doors (often bedroom doors), no one really knows what normal is. A book a day? A month? A year? Do self-help books count, or only novels? What if they're on tape?

In the absence of a Kinsey-style report on American reading habits, one can only guess what's going on in the dormitories, airport lounges and on the porch swings of the land. And yet there are signs of a kind of reading renaissance--from the rise of espresso-serving superstores to the emergence, on national TV and in countless living rooms, of book clubs and reading groups. At the least, it appears, reading books (or listening to them in the Jeep) is to the 1990s what gymgoing was to the '80s: something we plan to do, something we want to do and, by all appearances, something everyone else is doing, even Oprah viewers. Perhaps primarily Oprah viewers.

"There has been a vast increase in the number of book outlets, in the number of readers and in the ways that books get to consumers," says William Phillips, editor in chief of Little, Brown. One new way books are making their way into readers' hands is via the Internet. Amazon.com an online bookstore, is experiencing soaring volume, while electronic literary journals, such as Salon salon1999.com) are increasingly popular. Random House randomhouse.com) Time Warner Trade Publishing pathfinder.com/twep and Simon & Schuster simonsays.com are among the growing number of publishers with their own Websites. Far from killing off the book, computers seem to be reinforcing its dominance. The Internet is still overwhelmingly text-based, promoting literacy in general, and yet the screen has not replaced the page. Says Barnes & Noble vice president Lisa Herling: "I don't think anyone would ever take a computer to bed or to the beach to read."

Someone might take a tape, though. To listen is not to read (especially if the book is abridged), but it's close enough for many. Audiobooks, long tainted by their association with motivational infomercial gurus, got a sorely needed cultural seal of approval when Hillary Clinton received a Grammy Award for her spoken version of her book, It Takes a Village. The market for audiobooks is booming. That may be, in part, because they are compact and convenient and offer pseudo intimacy with sages and celebrities. The forthcoming John F. Kennedy: A Journey to Camelot by Paul Werth will be read by Sidney Poitier and Caroline Kennedy. Slightly less ritzy (intended, perhaps, to be played in Dodge pickups instead of Lexuses) is Waylon Jennings' rendition of Waylon: An Autobiography. To those who scoff at such books as "ear candy," Seth D. Gershel, publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio, has a snappy answer: "If you'd rather be counting from 1 to 10 over and over again while driving, that's your preference."

Can videobooks be far behind? To promote her latest novel, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood starred in a video intended for distribution to book clubs, which are hot these days and getting hotter. Moving into the social vacuum created by the decline of Tupperware parties while appealing to some of the same higher yearnings as 12 Step groups, book clubs are invading homes, apartments and even TV studios. It's ironic. Oprah Winfrey, the woman once charged with debasing American culture through years of tacky psychodramas, has become, in a flash, the torchbearer of literacy, promoting such solidly challenging fare as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon along with such worthy popular entertainments as Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Her book-club selections are instant megasellers, even when, like The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton, they have fallen into virtual obscurity. The result for publishers has been happy confusion. The lucky books are rushed back to the presses for multiple, emergency printings, and publicists are running in circles trying to play the new game. "Authors of books on subjects like libertarianism phone me up and say, 'Get me on Oprah!'" reports a frazzled flack. "How do I tell them she's probably not interested?"

Most book clubs, however, are informal, private affairs, chautauquas in a bottle. Sometimes aided by bookstore "liaisons," who often sell them books at a discount and may even provide a meeting space, these do-it-yourself salons offer a literary booster shot for people nostalgic for dorm-room bull sessions. Laura Srebnik, 42, is a New York City policy analyst whose group meets once a month. "I love it," she says. "I believe you have to set up situations where you can think about larger principles." A high-powered book club in Washington, started by Kenneth Brody, the former president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and made up of lawyers, journalists and government officials, hired a university professor to guide it through classics like The Iliad that members may have, well, skimmed as undergraduates. Virginia Valentine, a liaison for Denver's Tattered Cover stores, finds that the book clubs' mainstays are women and that they are reading everything from Waller to Wharton. "A lot of young women feel frustrated that there isn't the intellectual outlet they had in college. I see young women when they're about 30."

Is the book-club craze linked to the aging of the American mind? Bart Schneider, who publishes the Minnesota-based Hungry Mind Review, is certain it is. "There's this whole 'soul industry' springing up," he says. "Baby boomers are awakening to the total emptiness of their lives, and reading is something they know is important and haven't quite forgotten how to do. Plus, a book club sure beats church and synagogue." In Los Angeles, traditionally the land of rampant intellectual insecurity and social transience, some book clubs fulfill a crucial dual role: they elevate members' sensibilities while helping them put down roots. "I get a lot of calls from newcomers in town," says Diane Leslie, an organizer of book clubs in what is now the nation's No. 1 book market. "They don't want to take a class because they don't want to be graded, but they've reached a point in their lives where they're looking for a pastime that is deeper than a movie."

Just how deep does the reading rage go? In the superstores--Barnes & Noble, Borders, Crown--where busy workers are sometimes more familiar with the inventory of flavored coffees than the location of the new John Updike novel--reading can seem like a sideshow, not the main event. Flutes play. Writers recite. Young singles munch bagels. Toddlers look for Waldo. "The idea of the cafe and the couches," says Steve Riggio, Barnes & Noble's chief operating officer, "is to make the store a good place to spend leisure time." Riggio's concept appears to be working. Superstores are expanding and multiplying (to the tune of 20% last year) and even stores whose main business isn't bookselling are aping the superstores' bibliophilic ambiance. In Manhattan's landmark Scribner's bookstore, fabled haunt of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a Benetton branch has set up shop and begun playing host to something called the Salon, a reading series featuring such swank young writers as Daphne Merkin, whose books will be on sale amid the turtlenecks.

"It's the rise of the cappuccino machine," sniffs Princeton professor Anthony Grafton, referring to the revolution in literary retailing. He teaches the history of reading and says his students "are less widely read now than a generation ago." Less widely, but perhaps more fashionably. Daisy Maryles, executive editor of Publishers Weekly, notes that "people want to read something they view as significant or trendy or that people are talking about." Could books be the latest life-style accessories? The equivalent of cigars for the brain? Several liquor firms have taken to sponsoring literary evenings at which prospective single-malt-Scotch buyers clink glasses with budding novelists. The association of booze and books is long, close and infamously troubled (would a stumbling William Faulkner or Dylan Thomas be welcome at such a gathering?), but the distilleries don't seem fazed. Nor do the clubbable, complicit writers.

There is one business, strangely, that is not making money off the reading craze: publishing. Profits are eroding. Revenues are flat. At HarperCollins, profits fell 66% in the second half of 1996, and it is rumored that Rupert Murdoch, the owner, is looking to quit the book business. Other companies are cutting staff and closing down divisions. Industry executives agree that more and more readers are buying more and more books; a record 2.17 billion books were sold in the U.S. last year, up about 20 million copies from the previous year and 100 million from 1993. But the action has not perked up publishers' balance sheets. Publishers (who have as many excuses for failure as alcoholic novelists do) blame high advances to authors, discounts to bookstore chains, a lack of up-and-coming big-name writers and even the nonliterary mass spectacles of last year's Olympics and elections.

But publishing is not the same as reading; one can founder while the other thrives. Go into a superstore at reading rush hour (weekday evenings and Saturday afternoons) and gaze at the spectacle: crowded tables and sofas, string quartets, a woman in horn-rims autographing a memoir about her childhood sexual abuse. Surely something profound is going on. Surely a New Age of Literacy has dawned. Or might it be that reading resembles sex in yet another way? Perhaps the people who are always talking about it--hatching book clubs, debating on the Internet, quoting from the latest New York Times review--are making up for the fact that they're not doing it. Maybe the people who read the most (the ones who always have and always will) don't feel any special need to say so. Reading may indeed be hip now, but most readers I know aren't hipsters, though many may long to be. They're too busy turning pages, scanning indexes and burning the midnight oil.

--Reported by William Dowell and Andrea Sachs/New York and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles, with other bureau reports

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL AND ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK AND JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS ANGELES, WITH OTHER BUREAU REPORTS