Category Archives: Reading

Farewell, Peak Literacy, We Hardly Knew You

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This essay of mine was first published yesterday, at Front Porch Republic. It is not farming related. But, nevertheless, I think many of you will appreciate it.

Home-cured country ham with red-eye gravy

With all of the worries and whirlpools of existential angst in this world, declining readership of books is top of my list. Where does it rank on yours? Does it even make it into the top ten?

I was an active kid, outside fishing or hunting most days. And when I didn’t have a line in the water or a bead on a squirrel, I was riding my bicycle, a cool Spyder bike with a purple banana seat, all over town and usually the few miles to the local Carnegie library in downtown Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s because most evenings I was perched on the couch at home reading until bedtime, and I needed an ample supply of books.

Even today, sitting quietly with an open book, slowly turning pages, one after the other, in measured rhythms, occasionally flipping back to reread a passage, is for me an escape pod from the current landscape of our world—not the natural world, with its own measured ways of experiencing, but the largely digital world by which it is now being supplanted. It strikes me that in escaping the modern distractions by reading a physical book, I plunge deeper into “real” life. Sadly, though, this appears to be an increasingly uncommon experience.

The data on readership is dire for those who value books in a culture, especially the numbers for young boys on their bikes. More than half of adults in the U.S. did not read a book to its end in the past year, and an astonishing 10 percent have not read a book in more than ten years. (This number may be lower than others you’ve seen, but that is because most surveys count as “reading” both listening to audiobooks—which, no matter how enjoyable that might be, is most certainly not—and skimming a few pages of a book but not finishing it.) Accounting for this depressing trend by age, readership falls off the map by the time we get to Gen Z—making this essay akin to bemoaning the lack of horse-drawn carriages on the interstate system. Even for those of us still in the category of readers, the number of books read annually is plummeting. And this is before we even consider the question of what is getting read.

In the city nearest where I live, Knoxville, Tennessee, during the 1990s, these bookstores were in operation: Book Star; Barnes & Noble; Borders, two locations; Davis-Kidd, two locations; Apple Tree; Incurable Collector; Book Eddy; Printer’s Mark; Gateway; Walden’s, three locations; B. Dalton; Andover Square; a nicely curated bookstore that focused on rare Civil War finds; and a lovely by-appointment shop in a basement devoted to books on books. Also on offer: Books-a-Million, National Book Warehouse, Book Warehouse in four locations, half a dozen Christian bookstores, another half-dozen paperback exchanges, and McKay’s. That’s thirty-seven just off the top of my head, and I’ve probably missed a few. We’ll call it forty bookstores for an MSA population of 500,000. (I knew this world intimately, by the way, having worked in six of them and owned the Printer’s Mark.)

The book retail landscape has altered dramatically since those distant days. Today Knoxville supports Barnes & Noble (one location), McKay’s, Book Eddy, Union Ave, and a couple of pop-ups, paperback exchanges, and Christian tchotchke shops masquerading as bookstores. So let’s be charitable and say there are ten bookstores serving a metropolitan area population that is now about 750,000. What has changed in these intervening years? Amazon? E-books and audibles? Personal computers and smart phones? Reading habits? The answer includes a bit of all six and at least a handful more.

For purely selfish reasons, the declining health of the culture of the book sorely troubles me: my first book was released in October. And it has lots of company. An astonishing 500,000 to a million new books are released by publishing houses in this country each year, the number burgeoning to as high as four million when self-published books are factored in. Amazon alone lists thirty-two million books for purchase, a glacial moraine of print. All of this, of course, became of special interest to me when my own little book joined that mass of titles in search of readers, and ever since I have ruminated on this decline of a once vibrant culture that, despite the flood of new works, threatens the contemporary printed word.

These grim numbers suggest at least two questions: Who reads any of those new books? And, do we need up to four million new titles entering the market each year? The answer to the latter is “probably not.” I can’t speak for others, but I seem to mine the past for my book readings, much more so than any present offerings. (Do not let that admission, dear reader, prevent you from purchasing the on again, off again No. 1–selling new book release on kayaking.) Why then do so many books continue to be printed? Perhaps the phenomenon can be chalked up to residual human creativity—the ghostly light from a vanishing tradition and culture, the creaking machinery of commerce that continues to operate even after the mechanics who serviced it have long since died. That could help explain why readership surveys also show that while some Americans still buy books, more and more they just don’t read them. The publishing industry is like a mining operation on autopilot that follows a thinning vein of minerals: still over-investing even as the resource and the returns have petered out.

The dwindling number of bookstores and the apparent accompanying loss of interest in patronizing them is complicated. Yet it seems only fair to point out that our willingness to interact with others was a trend that had already been accelerating way before the pandemic kicked it into overdrive (Bowling Alone anyone?). It’s probably not an irony and should not be a surprise that the activity of reading a book, which is after all best done in quiet solitude, is ultimately unable to sustain or justify a public presence.

As an author, I have been going through the process (thus far, a seemingly futile and certainly unsatisfying exercise) of assisting the publisher and sellers with the marketing of my book. It’s a process with which, while I am no expert, I do have some experience. I’ve been struck by how curiously antiquated the printed and bound “product” is to those who are charged with putting it before the public. I’ve also been struck by the number of people in the book-producing-and-selling business who are uninterested in their product. On the retail end, there was the manager of a bookstore who admitted, without embarrassment, that she doesn’t read books and never has. She might as well have been stamping passports for the lack of excitement and knowledge she exhibited as she went about putting books on the shelves.

If the publisher of my book is an example, working in that industry has now become akin to selling harnesses to Model T owners. That could explain why the staff I’m dealing with have been genuinely at a loss as to how to actually promote books, one of the industry’s raisons d’etre. It also might help me understand why the “marketing specialists” would recommend that I post tweets, TikToks videos, and clever Facebook memes in a feeble attempt to pry attention from the distracted gaze of glazed-over eyes; why those marketing specialists had obviously never bothered to examine the titles they were tasked with trying to promote, yet offered pdfs informing authors up front why their book was sure not to sell–then, by their own lack of interest and skill, did their dead-level best to make sure those warnings came to fruition.

As for the traditional venues for using other print media to market new book titles? Well, they just don’t have the presence in our lives anymore to matter. Newspaper readership has dropped from a peak of sixty million in the 1970s to around twenty million today, and that number continues to fall. That a newspaper would decline to run a review of a book for an audience that no longer shows up to read even seventh-grade-level content is somewhat understandable.

As we move towards the possible civic apocalypse of 2024, I’m reminded of what reading books adds to our democracy. Although I often read popular fiction for escape, I just as frequently pick up a book of history or essays to educate myself in the art of being a better person or citizen. It is with that latter point in mind that I ask you to consider these scenarios: Would a Robert Kennedy, speaking to a black working-class crowd today after the assassination of a Martin Luther King Jr., quote Aeschylus … to nodding approval and understanding? In a presidential debate in the first half of the twentieth century, would a “journalist” have asked the candidates, “Which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” The former occurred in 1968, the latter in the past few months. You may draw your own conclusions about the current state of our informed citizenry and our aspiring leaders.

In all honesty, I don’t know how we can pass along the love and power of reading a book without the physical structures (which includes libraries that are more than just a venue to use free computers) that place them before our eyes. Books have always been a peculiar product, straddling the line between commerce and culture, encouraging personal dialogue and public discourse, both entertaining and enlightening. But in this, our present, more often than not, the physical book is just a dusty curio displayed in a museum no longer visited and seldom open for visitors. Reading a book is now relegated to the same exhibition hall world of playing bluegrass. What was once a front porch activity engaged in as family and neighbors has been relegated to obscure festivals, appreciated only by performing professionals and dwindling numbers of aficionados.

Having worked in the book business for three decades, I’ve watched the declining number of buyers and readers up close and personal, and the one trend that troubles me most is the vanishing boy from that world, the boy destined to become tomorrow’s citizen or even president: he has become a rare sight in bookstores and libraries, almost as rare as a bicycle with a banana seat.

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Much of the research that I drew on for this musing comes from a study done by wordsrated. Although there have also been a host of studies done by other organizations, the picture painted is always depressingly similar. Also, if any of you discerning readers interprets criticism of a publisher to be aimed at Front Porch Republic, please note that my book’s imprint is FPR, which is substantially different than its publisher, which does the printing and promoting.

In Praise of Printed Journals, Newsletters, and Ephemera

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The first tomato (Cherokee Purple) of the year.

Change happens, with or without our participation, in the cultural blink of an eye. Consider that it has only been 12 years since I stopped wearing a jacket to Friday night dinner at Hunter’s Cafe in Sweetwater. It’s something I recalled when a recent farm volunteer expressed her discomfort with wearing anything but sweatpants and T-shirt to college classes: “It would make me feel too uncomfortable to ‘dress’ up.”

No turning back, I guess. Even more Quixotic would be to arrest the digital flood of information that too often buries good writing. Although ‘flood’ may not be the best description; a flood leaves damage and evidence of its passing. The digital word, this most ephemeral of ephemera, this nontangible, unable to hold content for longer than the next click, diffusing into the ether with a fading screen, is my chief concern.

Newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, journals, quarterlies, newsletters, letters, ephemera of all sorts, have almost entirely disappeared from our lives, leaving behind only the debris of seldom-read mass-produced circulars to be dumped into the nearest landfill. The digital world has completely replaced the regular timetable of the printed with an endless flood of content, curated or not, in an inbox that vanishes from the mind, even if read, before the next click of Refresh.

The humble church bulletin (or any newsletter from a community group) is now replaced by a Facebook page, or a QR code. The nature of that particular ephemera was that it lingered in your life, the bulletin floating around on your car seat or countertop, a visual reminder that someone was sick, dead, or getting married.

Or ponder the endless stream of well-curated writing on the online platform Substack. It’s a venue where smart and intellectually curious people craft some of the best essays to be found, but the pieces are written for the digital world, amid the tsunami of information and amusement. They have no permanence. They flood in and wash out into nothing, given life only briefly by our distracted eyes, the authors already busy creating new “content” before the last article has disappeared under the sedimented layers of bytes.

Here on the farm, we still subscribe to several print journals and receive newsletters from those dwindling number of organizations that bother with paper. It may seem too obvious to say, but the thing about receiving a copy of Local Culture (Front Porch Republic) or the wonderful Farming Magazine (Kline family) in the mailbox is that those publications linger in our lives. I may sit down and read it cover to cover and toss it aside or stack it by my reading chair. A month later Cindy may pick it up and read an article or essay. “Did you read the piece by Kunstler?” she asks.

“Hmm, remind me,” I’ll say. She does and I realize I need to reread it. Or I pick up the year-old copy of Farming Magazine in the bathroom and read the series on growing potatoes, again. Having printed matter at hand encourages conversations, fosters relationships that endure far longer than those engendered by the sharing of a link by email. Print is, literally, durable. The online world promotes a restless consumption, whose writings are instantly out of date. We don’t go back to the inbox, because it is already jammed anew. What is read is then gone — out of sight and out of mind — with the blink of a screen.

You won’t discover a scrapbook of digital links put together in an old trunk by your grandmother, a QR code for the funeral service bulletin for your grandfather in a file or a book. You won’t go into the bathroom and find a collection of essays in cloud storage nestled on top of the toilet. This world is ephemeral; ephemera belonged to another age.

We no longer exist in a continuum where time and custom are married. Today’s culture is all too immediate and of no lasting duration. Our contactless future is now. So, shuffle over here in your bunny slippers and hit Delete, then Refresh. A world of fresh distraction awaits.

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Reading this weekend: The Epistles of Horace (translated by David Ferry)

Farm Cooking

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Among these crowded shelves where I sit are more than 100 cookbooks and books on food history. They are shelved immediately behind my writing desk for quick reference and inspiration when the spirit flags during the day. They are a varied lot. At least a half-dozen books on curing meat and another clutch of titles on preserving the harvest. A history of bourbon resting next to a culinary history of mushrooms, which in turn leans on a book of Cuban food. It is an egalitarian crowd, rubbing shoulders just over mine.

Farming, for me, has always been about providing for our table. A thought that had me thinking about the books that have inspired me to cook what we have produced. And in the last 22 years, we have produced 95 percent of the meat we consume and 75 percent of the vegetables, so, we do need a lot of inspiring. I try and cook based on two criteria. The first is giving consideration for what is in season or what we have that is preserved, cured, or frozen. The second is factoring in that the ingredients are easily grown, substituted, or found at a general grocery store (no champagne vinegar required).

Below are five titles that, while not exhaustive, are favorites because to my way of thinking, they are farm friendly. Certainly, plenty of worthy candidates have been left out. But there they rest behind me, whenever I need them, shelved somewhere between the Convivial Dickens and The Wurst! German cookbook.

  1. Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden (R. Lundy). As Roy Blount Jr. said, “I declare, Ms. Lundy, this is all so good.” And like all truly good cookbooks, this jewel is part memoir, part travelogue, and mostly an immense resource for those gardening in the Upper South. Flip through it and look for the recipes with an accumulation of grimy fingerprints or splattered with juice. Those are the ones that get referenced and cooked from often. From the first time you fix Lundy’s crookneck squash casserole (p. 208), corn fritters, okra grits and winter tomato gravy, or even turnip custard, you know you are not going to be bored with your garden produce. But you might need an extra stomach or three.
  1. A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South (J. Edge). This fine collection is drawn from a deep well of knowledge, community cookbooks. Red-eye gravy, perfect biscuits, squirrel dumplings, pickled pigs’ feet, cream of peanut soup, and for the cold winter nights, a glass of frothy syllabub. This is Southern cooking at its best, with one hand on the skillet and the other plunged into the dirt, a shooting of a rabbit while also mentally composing a list of ingredients needed for rabbit pie (p. 187) kind of text. It has roots; water them if you wish to keep them.
  1. Greens (T. Head). This is one of the Savor the South cookbooks, put out by the University of North Carolina. Other titles have wonderful names like Tomatoes and Beans and Field Peas or Ham. Each is a slim volume devoted to the history and recipes of the title subject. While I have a dozen from the series, only Thomas Head’s work gets pulled down multiple times a year. Because, in East Tennessee, we grow greens, we eat greens, we love our greens. But even the most devoted greenophile needs some inspiration. Head provides it. Potlikker soups and turnip green gratins grace these pages, as do oysters Rockefeller with collards and, an as yet untried, collard green marmalade. Believe me, there is no excuse to grow bored with the bounty of greens. (Cooking the basic Southern greens, p. 18, for lunch will set you just right for an afternoon of working in the garden or taking a nap. Your choice.)
  1. French Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals and Gatherings (S. Reynaud). This choice was a toss-up with the author’s classic, Pork and Sons, a cookbook that starts with killing a 400-pound hog and ends with 350 pages of recipes using everything but the squeal. Why do I like French country cooking? Because so much of it mirrors the essence of Southern cooking, as the Reynaud title indicates: family meals and gatherings. That cross between conviviality and seasonal eating speaks to me of home. With an emphasis on what is fresh and in season and the best way to celebrate its goodness, each page for the small-farm owner is a new way to reinterpret the possibilities in your own larder. The butcher’s wife’s pork chops (p. 228) is just such a recipe, made new depending on the season in which it is cooked.
  1. The River Cottage Meat Book (H. Fearnley-Whittingstall). Like the Reynaud book, this work begins with a slaughter, then proceeds nose to tail through the whole pantheon of meat — beef, lamb and mutton, pork, poultry, game, and offal of all sorts, it is all in here. This 2004 work helped shape how we farm and certainly influenced the ways in which I cook. The citrus-braised lamb shanks (p. 300) that we eat only once a year (when we put a lamb in the freezer) are worth the wait.

That last sentence sums up the wisdom found in the pages of these titles: The pleasures of cooking something remarkable at select times of the year. No mid-January fresh strawberries, no lamb shanks whenever you want them. Patience and honor are the best seasonings for the simple good ingredients you bring from your farm to your plate.

Eat, as my grandmother Roberts said, until you have had a sufficiency. That will be enough.

Desert Island Books

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The BBC Radio has a longstanding program called “Desert Island Discs.” Each week, the program invites a notable to be cast away on a hypothetical desert island with recordings of eight songs of his choice, plus the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and one book pick. The guest also gets one luxury item. The format is an interview with the person about his life and why the songs mean something to him. The program, which is available as a podcast, is quite enjoyable.

Go big or go home

So if I could choose only eight books (single-volume titles only) to accompany me in an exile, what would they be? If we are talking about a banishment of a weekend, then a selection from the current pile of books by my chair would suffice. For a month or two? Well, a slightly different list of criteria might come into play. And what if my time as a castaway was indeterminate, possibly years without contact? Selecting those few books to accompany, to suffice, to hold my attention, becomes a formidable feat indeed. In any given year, I’m likely to pull a hundred books off my shelves, if only to read a page or a chapter. But limit that number to eight in what could extend to a lifetime, my choices would be required to soothe, entertain, or educate, again and again.

Of course, the BBC program makes no reference to the type of island, the “Desert” of the title seems more a stand-in for “deserted” than for an arid wasteland. Most guests interviewed make the assumption that it is a tropical island. For myself, I’m going to take the liberty of claiming a remote rocky isle in the north or south Atlantic, one not far enough in either direction to be barren. A place where in exile I could still raise a garden of greens and root vegetables in the shelter of a stone wall. Maybe tend a small flock of wild sheep, a scraggly bunch of chickens, work outside before retiring at night into a 300-year-old stone cottage. (This is my island, get your own.)

When preparing to pack my eight titles, it became clear that most fiction wouldn’t work: A simple murder mystery, much as I love a well-written one, would not make the cut. Once it was read it would be tossed aside, at least for a few years. The books for the solitary exile must contain worlds within worlds that sustain his interest, making him want to pull them off the shelf, day after day, month after month, year after year. Truly, this is an impossible task. And whatever I select today might change tomorrow. But once rowed onto that rocky shore, shoved off the dinghy and left behind … it’d be too late to make a trade-in.

So here’s my list. I tried to put it together on mere instinct. A few of the books are solid choices; the others shifted about as I typed. Many different anthologies sprang to mind only to be discarded on a whim. In the end, some made the list for the simple reason that I ran out of time: The gendarme is knocking at the door. No time to pack. My exile for unnamed crimes commences today.

Eight Books for Exile

Book 1: Icelandic Sagas. The Folio edition edited by Magnus Magnusson. An evening reading of Hrut and his unsatisfied wife, Unn, or the endless tales of bloody vengeance, battles with Skraelings, and other assorted adventures from another island should be the tonic to take my mind off my own isolation. And, if Unn floats over on a raft to say hello, well….

Book 2: Complete Works of Shakespeare. Even if I am not reading each play from start to finish, just dipping a toe in the inspiring waters of the St. Crispin’s Day speech has got to be worth an evening, or two, or perhaps one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-four.

Book 3: Lord of the Rings. By J.R.R. Tolkien, the big single-volume edition. First off, I should state that this is not my favorite book or author and that out of his works I prefer The Hobbit. But I’m in exile, dammit, for God only knows how long. And it is an entertaining story that I have already enjoyed reading once, and it has the added blessing of being pretty darned long. Plus, with my meager memory, I could get to the end and start to wonder how it all began … and start over, there and back again (or, was that the other one?).

Book 4: Webster’s New International Dictionary. My 1910 copy runs close to 3,000 pages. There is enough in this volume alone to fascinate, educate, and pass a lifetime of lonely evenings.

Book 5: Meditations. By Marcus Aurelius, the Hicks translation titled The Emperor’s Handbook. I read a little of Aurelius most mornings. It has helped me make sense of the world for many years. So, while sitting on a promontory pondering my misdeeds, a few paragraphs might serve to calm the spirit.

Book 6: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The Modern Library edition. So this slot was reserved for the Library of America volume of Wendell Berry’s fiction. But those stories, of family and community, might just cause me to leap over the cliff some late night in a fit of isolated despair. Instead, this classic collection of things that go bump in the night should be the tonic, with the cold wind outside rattling the cottage, to scare myself silly while sipping on my Scotch or bourbon (more on this later), reading by the peat fire.

Book 7: The Iliad. By Homer, Robert Fagles’s translation. I reread this from start to finish this past year. Now, in these succeeding months, I find myself thinking of those doomed men and women, both the victorious and the vanquished. Sitting alone on a scarp, watching and hoping for the boat to arrive someday and release me, I could while away the days rereading those ancient pages. Particularly of Hector, the family man, the man of honor, brother to the self-centered weakling Paris.

Book 8: The Nordic Cookbook. By Magnus Nilsson. At close to 800 pages, this encyclopedic insight into the cooking traditions of the Nordic world should be just the thing to reference when I need to roast a puffin, cure and smoke a leg of mutton over sheep dung, pickle a seal’s head, or figure out yet one more way of making porridge out of the same four ingredients taste good. That Nilsson is a good writer and this book an amazing read are an added bonus.

I am also allotted one luxury item. Mine is that my island, miraculously, is located near an ocean current that drifts in a case of fine-tasting Scotch or bourbon to my rocky shores at least once a year. It could happen. The SS Politician was no myth.

So, what eight books are you taking when they come for you?

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Reading this morning: lamb cookbooks

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Falling Letters

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There are days when the feeling of being a relic of another age haunts my every step. Such as last night, while looking for a recipe for fried catfish, when I found a letter, tucked into the pages of a cookbook, from an old friend. Instead of preparing dinner, I caught up with the 2011 version of my friend in her small village in Norfolk, England.

I could have just as easily grabbed my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and read the tucked-away letter from my friend Phil (who lives in London) from 1996, in which he provided a translation of slang to help me understand the novel. Or the long letter from Uncle Al, now deceased, from January 1981, following my visit from Lake Charles to see him and his wife, my aunt, in Knoxville over Christmas 1980. Among the hundreds of books in my library reside dozens that hold the ephemera of my life.

This habit of longstanding, the placing of letters and postcards received into books selected at random, rewards me in ways that are increasingly hard to convey. It provides me with renewed emotional connections to people I know and love. This habit, shared by many, is the reason that out-of-print bookstore owners carefully leaf through the pages of books as they purchase: to find those records of life (and the occasional currency) that, in the sellers’ case, add value to the book.

It is also one of the reasons booksellers prefer the well-worn book to the newly printed title. Those old books are sanctified, bathed in the blood of time, and they share a permanent kinship with the former owner. Out of a biography of William Morris I once purchased fell an invoice dated July 23, 1926, from Mayhew Second-hand Booksellers on Charing Cross Road, London. That I had an invoice from that road, so well known among bibliophiles (84 Charing Cross Road), to a woman living in Knoxville, Tennessee, was a miraculous connection. I would like to have known her and why she ordered that title from that shop.

There is a cultural value to ephemera, whether it’s a postcard addressed to me or an invoice tucked away in a book or a bundle of letters nestled in a drawer. It connects us all. If not for the practitioners of writing letters and saving letters, I would not now have the correspondence of my father to his mother, written while he was stationed in the Pacific during World War 2. Or the letter of a great-great aunt to my great-grandmother complaining of getting fat from drinking beer in her old age (found in a book of my grandmother). By losing the ephemera, we lose the moments of serendipity that go with it.

The overall decline in literacy — the familiar drum I pound too often — will, no doubt, have its detrimental effect. But so too will the overall loss of curiosity about our past that this minor act of historical mining encourages. Why would we be interested in the letters of an aunt or uncle, found in a book, if we don’t read books in the first place? Write a letter when we care only about digital bytes of information, or simply reject the past in all of its parts in favor of the self-chosen family of the present? For the uninquisitive, the aliterate, the presentist, the past is opaque, perhaps never even occurred. The life of the email, the text, the tweet, the Instagram picture, all are ephemeral, each instantly deletable.

While this digital infatuation may be the enemy of future scholars, it is our collective loss as well. So, I leave you with this wish, that this Christmas season you experience the genuine pleasure of opening a book and having a letter fall into your lap, leaving you to spend a few minutes or an evening recalling a friend, a loved one, even a stranger, and for a moment in time step out of the present.

Thanks to my friend Richenda and her rediscovered letter for prompting these thoughts.