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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

He's joking right??

Author Larry McMurtry sees the end of book culture Lifestyle/Features Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40.
I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries.
They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t." Did it never occur to him that perhaps he has either a bad location or perchance he is too expensive? Or more likely considering the genre he usually writes in, that people don't associate his bookstore with children's books??

After all this is the author who helped pen "Ropeback Mountain" and he is write "Lonsome Dove" ... I would never think to take my kids to his store.

But here's what I know -- my kids are on waiting lists for books at the library because they are very popular .... children in schools are required to read either a minimum number of pages or number of books each year ... and this does not include newspaper or magazine articles they read as well ... the quality of writing has falled greatly in recent years.

Don't believe me? Look at the quality of the work -- do you see any new books that would survive the way any of Jane Austen's, Bronte sisters' , Doyle, Verne, Stevenson, Sabatini, Dumas, Dickens, Hamner, or Laura Ingalls Wilder's have? Very few. Perhaps the Brown work "DiVinci Code" might, mostly for its controversy than for its content ... I just don't see it.

We live in a world now where just about anyone can get published thanks to sites such as Amazon & Barnes&Noble ... not that its necessarily a bad thing, a lot of really good writers are getting published that would normally get lost in the mass of manuscripts -- but the problem is now they are getting lost in the throng of formulated, poorly written books being spit out onto the market.

Reading isn't a dieing art - its just that the works of art are that great to look at.

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