Among the many monstrously anti-literate things said to me by folks who saw me reading books, statements to the effect that people who read books don’t have lives, that reading is for fags, that I was a Poindexter or a nerd or so on, the conversations that have long horrified me most are those with people to whom the idea of a novel is apparently a brand new one, never once encountered before.
“What is this?”
“A novel?”
“A what?”
“A book. A story.”
(flipping through it looking for pictures) “Wow. There are a lot of words.”
“Not too many to read.”
“And this is, like, a story?”
“Yes.”
“You mean like in a movie?”
“Yes.”
“And people read this?”
“Yes.”
“How do they know it’s a story?”
“They went looking for one. Or they read the back cover blurb.”
“How do they know to do that?”
“Because that’s the way back cover blurbs work.”
“Why’s your name on the cover?”
“Because I wrote it.”
“You wrote all these words?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to tell a story.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what I do.”
“And people read this?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m good at it.”
“How do they know that?”
“Because I’ve done it many times before.”
“How come there aren’t any pictures?”
“Because most books don’t have pictures.”
“How do you know what’s happening, then?”
“You read the words.”
“All of them?”
“You could read only every other word, but then it probably wouldn’t make much sense.”
“Did you draw the cover?”
“No. An artist did that.”
“Why?”
“They paid him.”
“Oh. Well, it’s a good drawing.”
“They paid me, too.”
“Who?”
“The publisher.”
“Who?”
“The people who print the book and sell it to people who want to read it.”
“How did they know to get you to write the book?”
“Because I’ve done it before and they know I’m good at it.”
“People really read this? All of this?”
“Yes.”
“You should give me a free copy.”
“No.”
Adults, man. I am not even exaggerating. Being a non-reader is one thing; that’s your prerogative. But not even having the slightest idea what a book is, even in theory…! As an adult living on this planet.
I have had this conversation many times, and no, I am not exaggerating.
Comment By: Steve Timberlake
March 10th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
Shudder hell. Suicide.
Comment By: Travis Creason
March 10th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
When coming back from MidAmeriCon II this past summer, the TSA agents were suspicious of so many books in my luggage. “This guy needs a cavity search, and go deep!”
Comment By: Michael Pullmann
March 11th, 2017 at 9:19 am
This would be acceptable from a small child, but something tells me this was not a small child.
Comment By: Barbara Kwasniewski
March 11th, 2017 at 10:25 pm
School? Textbooks? English class? None of the above?
Comment By: Paul Riddell
May 1st, 2017 at 1:48 pm
I can top this: I always got the ones who never read and didn’t buy books, but who couldn’t wait to write a book “when they had the time.” The process and the output were immaterial: the process of writing to them was some strange cargo cult where you went from idea to “getting published” to never having to work ever again because that published piece magically paid out millions of dollars. (Nearly 25 years ago, I was a long-term temp at CompUSA’s original headquarters, right after my first book was accepted. I made the mistake of sharing that news with my coworkers, and the universal response all the way up the management chain was “So you’ll be leaving us, right?” They weren’t surprised when I told them that I wasn’t independently wealthy from my writing and that I was working there to get more inspiration. They weren’t surprised when I explained that I couldn’t just come into work with boxes of copies, and that I was actually paid based on how many copies sold. They weren’t surprised: they were ANGRY, because that went contrary to what they thought happened to writers.)