We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when asked if he wanted a book for Christmas, answered “thanks, but I already have one”). That was around 50 years ago, and he went on to a very successful legal career.
Fifty years ago, the main competitors for books were TV and radio. Critics at the time decried the passive mode of consuming these broadcast media, compared to the active engagement required by reading. Now, in many respects, the complaint is the opposite. The various services available on the Internet are interactive, and engrossing, finely tuned to keep our attention.
The most notable feature of the Internet, in this context, is the still-central role of reading and writing. That’s diminished a bit as it’s become easier to share video and images on sites like TikTok and YouTube, but there’s still a huge amount of text out there. Lots of people who would probably never have picked up a pen after leaving school fifty years ago are now tapping out messages of various kinds on Facebook, What’sApp and so on.
Then there is the essentially limitless array of online newspapers, magazines, blogs, newsletters and so on. At every level of quality and complexity, and in every imaginable form, the amount of text that’s easily available to read is massively greater than it used to be. And time is finite. Even though I don’t watch much TV, and avoid online video completely, and even though I’m a very fast reader, I don’t have as much time for books as I used to. I’m hoping to change that as I go into retirement, but we’ll have to wait and see.
In these circumstances, the surprise is that books (and newspapers for that matter) have held on as well as they have.
Text has even reconquered territory from video. It’s now commonplace, particularly for young people, to watch video with the subtitles on, apparently so that they can “flick their eyes up and read ahead, then take in the whole scene quickly, and look back down at their phone”. I imagine we will soon be hearing from auteur-style directors complaining that the ubiquity of such subtitles means that the true visual genius of their work is not fully appreciated.
Rather than bemoan the decline of books, this might be a good time to consider why we read (and write) books and what they are good for. Are they essential, or just a specific technology which is less needed now, but for which there is a lot of nostalgia (like cursive handwriting).
I’ll focus on academic work, since it’s what I know best. In this context, it’s striking that some disciplines, like economics, have largely given up on books in favour of journal articles (I’m an exception, but I mostly write “trade” books aimed at a general educated public). In others, like history, having at least one book seems to be essential for tenure. And, in sociology, it’s claimed, there are “book departments” and “article departments”
Are these differences cultural and path-dependent, or do they reflect fundamentally different ways of undertaking and communicating research. I can see arguments for both views, but I’ll leave that up for discussion. Regardless, it seems likely that the shift away from books will continue. Fields where books have been the traditional way of communicating will either have to change, or to treat book reading as a research skill that can’t be assumed and needs to be taught/inculcated.
{ 34 comments }
Alan White 10.20.24 at 6:04 am
In my field, philosophy (probably like most others presently), books historically are a kind of sedimentary rock that drove discussion about central issues. Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel–all bookish bodies of complex thought that intertwine basic issues of metaphysics and epistemology. Above that layered bedrock modern philosophy has tended to fray into one of the two issues with human interests (fueled by Kant along with Mill) of (meta)ethics interwoven as needed–a kind of unsettled mud-pack not quite hardened into anything recognizable as a world view. The last such big-picture philosopher was Whitehead, nearly a century ago. Most big figures since–Lewis, Putnam, Kripke, etc.–are architects of general stances about realism and such–metaphilosophers– rather than world-makers. So I’d say book-writing has changed itself–into primarily becoming concerned with points of view rather than bold declarations about constitutes reality and knowing about it. Journal articles have then dominated since Whitehead to pursuing specific metaphysical and epistemic issues. But specialization was also driven by the professionalism of the discipline, encouraging it in terms of employment and promotion. So I think big books about world-views are dead for the most part.
David in Tokyo 10.20.24 at 6:58 am
In Japan, literature (both popular and serious) and criticism seem to be alive and well. The four major monthly lit/crit magazines (and their quarterly and academic bretheren) are still going strong, ditto for the popular lit. rags. The two major literary prizes (one for serious lit, one for popular lit, both awarded twice a year) remain major media events. There are multiple librophile YouTube channels overenthusing over the latest light fiction.
I do hear complaints that sales are down, and smaller bookstores are said to be having a rough time of it. Here, my SO far prefers to read social commentary and light lit. on the Kindle, simply because prior to Kindle, that stuff used to result in piles of outdated magazines and pulp fiction clogging up our space. So that’s stuff that’s purchased online, not at a bookstore.
Trying again to find comparative statistics on publishing in Japan v.s. Great Brittain:
One site says: “The size of the publishing market in Japan amounted to 1.6 trillion Japanese yen in 2023, which made it one of the largest publishing markets in the world.” That would make it 1,600 billion yen, or about 10 billion Pounds, vs. GB’s 6 billion Pounds 60% of which is exports. But Japan’s population is almost twice that of GB.
As a Japanophile, you really don’t want to listen too closely to my ranting, but I get the impression that the Japanese really really really like reading and writing Japanese, even though it’s a horrific pain in the butt.
Dunno about academic publishing, but if the above numbers are even close to correcnt, Japan’s publishing world is doing OK…
FWIW, I read a rant somewhere to the effect that folks ranting about kids these days not reading books tend to be talking about Dickens and the dead white male canon, and that in real life Dickens has, for the younger generation become one more generation removed linguistically, and thus requires a much more major “code switch” than it does for my generation. I tried rereading Frankenstein recently, and it was fine, but Middlemarch defeated me something fierce. (I asked an English lit. prof. at a party the other day, and he said, “Yep. Middlemarch is a bear. I wouldn’t want to even think about trying to teach it.”). I have good intentions of giving it another try, though.
seth godin 10.20.24 at 11:03 am
The two forces that are undermining the book are surprising:
1. there are more of them being published than ever before, by a factor of 10 or more
2. there are fewer places to buy them
The end result is that the economic engine for publishing is falling apart. When anyone can publish, anyone will, and the long tail is quite real.
This means that the cultural and academic value of being published goes way down.
And it means that the economic forces that created all the scaffolding around books, the scaffolding that made them feel special for a century, is eroding fast.
If you want to spread an idea
or you want to make a living
or you want to pursue a combination of the two…
a book is increasingly not the way to do that. Reading still matters, and I hope it will for a long time to come. But the specific peculiar conditions that led to the book industry itself are going away.
PS my new book is out on Tuesday. I wrote it because it’s thrilling, it’s what I do and I had something that felt like it complemented the medium. But I have no illusions that it will produce the sort of impact my books of twenty years ago did. This world has changed very fast.
SusanC 10.20.24 at 3:07 pm
Socrates reportedly overjoyed.
“Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.”
SusanC 10.20.24 at 3:11 pm
There’s at least one academic book (I think it’s “Delusions”by Peter McKenna) where the preface jokes about the author having initially thought that writing a book would benefit his academic career. (Yeah, there might be several levels of joke in there, given that the whole book is work of clinical psychology about psychotic delusions.)
LFC 10.20.24 at 5:46 pm
There is much that could be said about the economics of the publishing industry, but that is not the topic of the OP. The topic of the OP is the “claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books.”
A while ago there was a widely circulated and fairly long New Yorker article about this general issue (among others) called, if memory serves, “The End of the English Major.” (I bought it in hard copy, set it aside to read properly, and never did.) One quotation from the piece that got a lot of attention was an English prof at an elite univ saying that her students were having problems with 19th cent prose, e.g. Hawthorne.
That’s anecdotal, but it may point to some kind of cultural shift. I don’t have problems w 19th cent prose myself, but I grew up before the Internet. (I think the reason I haven’t read Moby-Dick cover to cover has to do w self-discipline, not the prose.) When I read Middlemarch as a freshman in college I found it absorbing almost to the point of being unputdownable (if that’s a word) and not difficult. Pretty similar experience w a less great but still good 19th cent novel, Germinal (in translation). To read this kind of book in “the digital age” one shd ideally shut off all the devices and just lose oneself in it. That requires perhaps a certain level of “privilege” — e.g. if you’re working outside of classes and worrying about money you may be less able or inclined to do this — and also some ability to concentrate one’s attention.
SusanC 10.20.24 at 6:47 pm
“A year or so later, having just moved to an academic job in Glasgow, and still labouring under the delusion that universities valued output in the form of books…” -Peter McKenna, in Delusions.
Peter Dorman 10.20.24 at 7:36 pm
The OP segues from a quick consideration of the “students don’t read books any more” refrain to the role of books in different academic disciplines. So each in turn.
I agree that one of the factors affecting book reading by people of all ages is that there’s so much nonbook reading out there. I’m in the same boat as JQ, and I’ve been retired (from teaching) for five years now. I remember when listservs became a thing in, what, the late 80s? For a few weeks I was in heaven: there are so many interesting people out there, and now I can read what they have to say! And very quickly I realized it was a big problem: there too many interesting people out there, and there isn’t enough time to read all of them and still do the other stuff you’re supposed to do. Later came blogs and then a flood of online journals etc. For millennia we were protected from the sheer profusion of human thought by the narrow ecologies of location and the costly communication of text and image. Now that protection is gone and every day is a blizzard unless you just shut it down.
As for students in particular, I taught at a strange school whose curriculum changed every year but always centered on reading books. And the students seldom read most of them. There were endless faculty complaints, but part of this was their fault: they assigned too many books and didn’t plan activities that depended on the books having actually been read. As an example of what an activity like this would look like, I would organize in-class “salons” around a particular topic and assign groups of students to represent the different authors in the discussion. Then we would drop the roles and discuss the merits of different points of view. When I didn’t do stuff like this, yeah, the books were quickly skimmed, if that. As to why, I think the short form of most text media the students engage with has made them more impatient, but also they have less time than I did when I was their age. Further, I think a terrible trend took hold in K12 a few decades ago, in which close reading of prose was largely abandoned as authoritarian and subjectivity-limiting. And the effects on writing skills were terrible too. (“In every diologic relationship there is a moment of induction — but it’s a Hegelian moment and it can last for years.” Paulo Freire. There’s a similar quote by Dewey but I can’t remember it now.)
Meanwhile, in economics (my discipline too) book have historically been frowned on because there was a sense that a correct edifice was being assembled bit by bit. The researcher’s task was to master the previous bits and add the next one. Even if there were controversies about a particular bit, they were in the context of consensus around the general framework and what constituted a solution. What’s the point of writing a book in such a world?
In general, I think an academic book is valuable if the author has something new or distinctive to say about a number of interrelated ideas. That shouldn’t happen very often in a person’s career, but if they have an exploratory bent it can happen a few times. I’ve published two academic books and am working on sort of a third (although it will have a trade framing). Looking back on them, I think I was forced to write in longer form because each idea I was trying to develop depended on several others. I wrote journal articles on the same topics, but it was torture, and they never went as far as I wanted to go.
If I were the editor of an academic press, I would require that book proposals contain a list of key arguments and a statement of why they need to be developed together.
maxhgns 10.20.24 at 7:47 pm
In general, I imagine that old rule of economics probably still holds: some 10% of readers likely account for close to half of all sales. Whatever that rule is called.
Academically, I think that willingness/ability to read even an article has gone down. In large part, I think that’s because it’s become a lot easier to get away with it recently, though it’s possible that students have lost some of the ability to focus for the time required.
For my part, I’ve always read a lot, and still do (about a book a week for pleasure, on top of what’s required for work [I’m am academic too]). I also listen to audiobooks now, in addition to reading physical books. But as far as schoolwork went… Well, I always prioritized my reading. I did all the reading for my major (philosophy), and almost none for my English classes (and I did some 36 or so credits of English). It was just too dull for me, and there was too much of it to balance against all the other reading I had to do.
engels 10.21.24 at 12:33 am
Critics at the time decried the passive mode of consuming these broadcast media, compared to the active engagement required by reading. Now, in many respects, the complaint is the opposite. The various services available on the Internet are interactive
These aren’t opposites: in both cases the criticism is that your mind is mostly switched off. With the possible exception of Choose Your Own Adventure, books were never interactive but could require a degree of mental participation (imagination, self-questioning, critical engagement) that neither TV or Twitter seem to have fostered.
Alex SL 10.21.24 at 2:11 am
Agreed. The addictive elements of social media are concerning, but there are more than enough children and teens who fall in love with book series to make claims of the death of reading and even of books seem premature and alarmist. I remember responding negatively to a post on this platform some time ago (months or over a year? no idea) that claimed literacy was on its way out and also argued that an image contained more information than a text, which has it exactly backwards. There is no way around writing and reading in complex society. Indeed I struggle to imagine an extraterrestrial species maintaining complex economic and political systems without having a directly analogous means of communicating and preserving complex ideas and explanations at the same level of information density.
That being said, I could at least see a future where people find it difficult to focus on a tome like Lord of the Rings and instead require more easily digestible little bits like a blog post or a short chapter posted at a time. But information overload, limited attention spans, and nobody finding the time to sit down and read for two hours straight because they are working unregulated gig jobs are not the same as the claim that books are on their way out.
having at least one book seems to be essential for tenure.
As a researcher myself, I would agree that it is extremely important to publish. What use is my work, after all, if I keep all its findings to myself? And it also has to be peer-reviewed, to demonstrate that I am not putting out complete nonsense. But this requirement of having to publish, specifically, a book has always struck me as ridiculous when I heard about it before. Surely it shouldn’t matter if somebody has one book or published the same amount of data and argumentation in, say, five journal papers instead? How do people in such a field justify themselves? Presumably with, that is simply how we do it? Randomly made-up gate keeping criteria without any defensible rationale.
Alan White 10.21.24 at 5:18 am
BTW I published my first co-edited book just last year, after 5 years of retirement. Why? Because I wanted to say stuff about free will. And my dedication to my Mom in the front. Just knowing that it will be in the library of Congress. So all about me I guess. Hey. it was a good book. But damn, I never want to do another index for crissakes.
SusanC 10.21.24 at 8:12 am
Project Gutenberg now uses AI to generate a summary of each of their ebooks. There’s a game you can play where you look for the summary that has missed the point the most badly.
I can imagine a skit you could write where your English Literature undergrads have not actually read the books they have been assigned, but have read AI generated summaries of them.
(Umberto Eco does a bit where a guy summarising manuscripts for a publisher hasn’t had time to read all of Philosophy in the Boudoir, has just dipped into the section in the middle, and has come to the conclusion that it’s a boring work of academic philosophy.)
SusanC 10.21.24 at 8:17 am
… whereas we know that de Sade had the better plan, of hiding a subversive French revolutionary pamphlet in the middle of a work of pornography, and hoping the censor got bored before they got to the political part :-)
Matt 10.21.24 at 10:28 am
“I can imagine a skit you could write where your English Literature undergrads have not actually read the books they have been assigned, but have read AI generated summaries of them.”
“Spark Notes” basically filled this role w/o AI for many years, perhaps more for highschool students than university ones, but for at least some university students. The trick w/ AI will be that it can turn the summary into a sort of pod cast that people can listen to. In my experience that means they’ll get even less out of it. (I have already had students who told me that they listened to recorded lectures while driving, and were annoyed that they didn’t learn enough to do well in the class that way.)
Because I teach law, we don’t assign “books” as such for the vast majority of classes, but it’s really essential that students read cases. (I assume that John’s brother read cases, if he became a successful lawyer.) I do have more and more students, though, who seem to think they can learn the law without reading the cases at all, and who often don’t bother to acquire the case book. At least the large majority who try this do not in fact manage to learn law very well at all.
David in Tokyo 10.21.24 at 12:04 pm
Another thing that crossed my mind is, to what extent is the “kids these days don’t read books” actually something that’s always been said about every generation. And has always been wrong. Stuff doesn’t get published without someone actually buying (and presumably reading) the books getting published. So someone’s reading. And they were kids once.
Another irrelevant thing that crossed my mind is that the amount of reading I do has varied wildly across my life. Reading was pretty much the only thing I did until I was 20, and then I didn’t read much for a long time (almost a decade (being a comp. sci. major will do that to you)). Then I read a lot of lightweight Japanese fiction (a couple of years after I started learning Japanese), and that got me back into reading.
So there was a 10 year period where I was a kids these days don’t read kid.
In further irrelevances, what happened to the Harry Potter generation? At one point it was claimed that Harry Potter was being reading’s salvation. That seemed to stop being said much at some point, and then it turned out that Ms. R. makes Attilla the Hun look like a nice guy. (I claim e. nesbit (the Psamead books) is worlds better than Harry P, but I seem to be the only one* who has ever read e. nesbit.))
*: If you are feeling like telling me I’m dead wrong about this, please, do so.
And speaking of books, I’m in the midst of a period of being a fan of the OUP’s “very short introduction” series. I’m generally pretty happy with them: stuff I know reminds me of how the rest of the world thinks about (or is told to think about) those things, and for stuff I don’t know, they’re easy introductions. I was disappointed with the Philosophy one (it was just what I needed as far as it went), but it didn’t cover much recent stuff and didn’t talk about philosophy of language. The one on the short story seemed too disorganized (or I failed to see the organization) and I dropped it part way through, but I’m loving the one on Film Noir. Now, I am sort of a film freak, having run the MIT Film Society for a year (projecting a 16mm print of something I wanted to see but the Boston area art houses weren’t showing every Friday), but I’ve been off that since then. But that book is seriously fun. I read a lot of Graham Greene in my pre-comp.sci. period, and since I don’t get along with religion, I sort of bleeped over those parts, but I did enjoy it, and it turns out that was a source of quite a bit of the noir genre. I wasn’t all that nuts to have been amused. Live and learn, as they say.
Alex SL 10.21.24 at 12:42 pm
maxhgns,
I suspect the ratio of articles read per researcher has gone down a lot, because we are drowning in published articles without a commensurate increase in the number of researchers. I, for example, read articles, but only very few compared to the number that gets published in my field.
LFC 10.21.24 at 4:24 pm
The article that apparently touched off this latest round (may be paywalled):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Trader Joe 10.21.24 at 6:09 pm
There’s a lot of different ideas in the OP. I’ll pick two.
On the question of are young people reading books, I think the answer is closer to “it depends.” I think interest in what might be described as canonical literature over the last 50 to 200 years is pretty low. By contrast I think interest in current topical literature is really pretty high, but (as someone uptread noted) the proliferation is so high and its not the sort of stuff that literature people read that its not treated with the same respect.
Will Sally Rooney or Ta-Nehisi Coates ever be deemed great literature? I have no idea, but you’re closer to the pin trying to engage younger to middle-age readers on these names than anything most here will have read back when we were in school.
Separately on publishing in general – the economics have changed substantially. Very little of what is published does any better than break-even. The industry has largely taken two approaches. The first is the ride the winning horse approach that turns writers like Patterson et al into giant book mills that the masses lap up. This accounts for most of the record volume that the industry publishes.
The second is throw 1000 things at the wall and see if any turn out to be popular approach….which basically acknowledges that apart from Oprah there are no taste setters and no one has any idea what will sell, you take as many shots as you can and hope that the few winners pay for all the losers.
From a literary criticism standpoint – the output of the former is regarded as low-brow and the output of the latter rarely has a deep enough following that any gain universal acceptance/acknowledgement. We see this regularly on this forum. If someone lists 10 books they loved in the last year, I may have heard of 6-8 of them, but probably have only read 1 or 2.
John Q 10.21.24 at 7:36 pm
David @2 I thought about code switching, and I think it’s not quite right. Printed text has stabilised language to an amazing extent, though it co-exists with oral language that can involve code switching. I’d say the big switch is the move to a post-industrial city. Factories with armies of low-paid workers, for example, were a central feature of working life from Dickens’ time (he worked in one as a child and its a central scene in David Copperfield) to the late C20. Now, they’ve pretty much disappeared from most of the rich world. That shift makes the concerns of the 19th century a lot less accessible to young people than it was 50 years ago.
LFC @18 The Atlantic article was picking up on comments I’d seen elsewhere, notably from Adam Kotsko on Facebook. That line of influence is interesting in itself
steven t johnson 10.21.24 at 9:58 pm
OT but short: E. Nesbit, good, yes, but don’t forget Diana Wynne Jones!
Lee A. Arnold 10.21.24 at 11:37 pm
I partly conceive of the voice narration as “reading” the visually-animated graphical language aloud. This is interspersed with reading aloud the momentarily-appearing English text:
“New Addition to Economic Theory and Method”
Alex SL 10.22.24 at 2:13 am
As always, I shouldn’t have replied when tired. What I meant at 17 was that the fraction of the available articles in their field that the average researcher reads has surely gone down, because there are so many more publications, even if each researcher still reads as many per year as they would have in, say, the 1980s. In other words, we throw much more text out there than our colleagues can realistically keep up with.
Part of it is that it has become very easy to write and publish; visualise the progression from scribe across printing press and type writer to computers and websites, and now (argh) LLMs. The other aspect is publish or perish, researchers not being evaluated on difficult concepts like “does their work have value” but instead on the easy-to-quantify but also easy-to-game “is number high”?
At any rate, one can certainly not claim that our society has stopped producing a lot of written words! Whether anybody can keep up with reading them is the question, but it is hardly a Youth These Days issue if people are drowning in mostly pointless logorrhoea that their predecessors would not have had to deal with.
MisterMr 10.22.24 at 1:01 pm
My two cents: the problem, if any, is not that people read less (on average I think people read much more today than in the past), but that people are less used to read long form books, and more used to read many many short chunks of text.
marcel proust 10.22.24 at 2:05 pm
Apropos SusanC @ 13 & Matt @ 15:
In HS, back in the early 1970s, my SIL had to read Moby Dick in an English class. The teacher solicited exam questions from the students (which seems humane and wise, but wait for it…) One of the questions she included asked about the atomic explosion in the book! On coming across it on the exam, most of the class asked the equivalent of (an appropriately-for-the-era cleaned up for class) “WTF?!” It turns out that instead of reading the text, one of the students had looked at the viewmaster version. One of the images displayed a whale (Moby?), complete with spout, which, looked like an atomic cloud if one was clicking past quickly and not bothering much with the captions. It turns out, as well, that the teacher had not bothered much with the reading and thought this was one of the more insightful questions.
So not just kids these days. Teachers as well!
CJColucci 10.22.24 at 3:36 pm
Matt@15:
I do have more and more students, though, who seem to think they can learn the law without reading the cases at all, and who often don’t bother to acquire the case book.
What is it they do read now? In my day, when the laws were inscribed on stone tablets, you could read commercial outlines or hornbooks by subject-matter experts and possibly get away with it. What do they do now?
John Q 10.23.24 at 8:30 am
At least in economics, and outside China, “publish or perish” is almost the opposite of the truth. Once you have an article in the “Top 5” (everyone knows the list), anything you publish in a journal of lower standing (except maybe in the top specialist journal in your subfield) reduces your market value. If I were going on the US market, I would have to claim that 80 per cent of my publications were the work of my evil twin, who differs from me only in middle name.
:
Matt 10.23.24 at 11:41 am
In my day, when the laws were inscribed on stone tablets, you could read commercial outlines or hornbooks by subject-matter experts and possibly get away with it. What do they do now?
My impression, at least, is that “hornbooks” are much less common in Australia than they are in the US, where there are a number of different compeating series. I’ve looked for such things myself, and haven’t had great luck. For example, when I moved to Australia, I taught two classes – workplace law and immigration and refugee law – that are both administrative law subjects. But though I’d taught and studied admin law in the US, I didn’t know Australian admin law well, so hoped to find a good “nutshell” or hornbook. It was very hard to do – I eventually found somthing but it wasn’t that great. This difference might be related to the fact that Australian law text books really are much more “textbooks” than US style “case books” – the amount of cases in them is much less, and there’s a lot more “text” by the authors telling students how to understand the bits of cases that are there. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing, but it’s at least different. That said, if the students don’t buy and don’t read the book, it won’t help them much.
I think some try to get by w/ on-line “notes” sites, which are perhaps a bit like old-style commercial outlines, though often not of good quality. This seems to be reflected in their work.
PeteW 10.24.24 at 7:51 am
The fastest-growing branch of publishing in recent years is audiobooks, which have gone from being a negligible sliver of the market to, e.g., about 10% of all US book sales in 2022/23.
Not sure if this qualifies the OP but are more young people listening to books rather than reading them?
Harry 10.24.24 at 1:57 pm
“which basically acknowledges that apart from Oprah there are no taste setters and no one has any idea what will sell, you take as many shots as you can and hope that the few winners pay for all the losers.”
The UK appears to have a market for celebrity-ish authors who write quite good genre fiction. Maybe celebrity is the wrong term — these are generally accomplished actors/performers/TV show hosts who seem to be able, presumably with help, to write and sell books, often for children. Exhibit #1 is Richard Osman, a TV producer turned game show host turned cozy crime author (whose books are outstanding, and will remain part of the canon for decades). But he’s far from alone (Dawn French, Ben Elton, Jenny Eclair, David Walliams, etc). In the US we don’t seem to have people like that — just people who lend their names to Jim Patterson, the assumption seeming to be that his books sell even more when they have names like Dolly Parton and Somebody Clinton on the cover.
SusanC 10.24.24 at 3:37 pm
Ben Elton (for example) was a writer for Blackadder, one of the great classics of British TV comedy.
I guess it’s not that big a jump for a successful writer of TV comedies to diversify into comic novels.
J-D 10.24.24 at 11:05 pm
Not only have I read many of her novels and short stories, it was only recently that I cited one of the stories (if you are wondering, it was ‘The Magician’s Heart’) in a comment on another blog. (Another Nesbit-fan commenter responded thanking me for drawing their attention to one they hadn’t read.)
David in Tokyo 10.25.24 at 5:49 am
Oops. I’m slow. Or the memory is getting that way…
It was Cliff Notes that was the thing back in my day. (I never bought one, though, since I only read for myself, not for class.) Amazon still has them with their characteristic yellow/black striped covers.
More recently, it’s been Schaum’s Outlines. No humanities (it seems), but their math books, both high school and higher levels, are useful. Terrible as books, but useful for practie problems, to review a field, and the like. At first glance, their book on Set Theory seemed to cover the material as well as any textbook. (Looking again, it is a textbook, just one in the shape of the Schaum’s series books, and a tad terse.)
Whatever.
Harry 10.25.24 at 3:37 pm
“I guess it’s not that big a jump for a successful writer of TV comedies to diversify into comic novels.”
Yeah, I guess all four in my parentheses, plus Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Alexi Sayle… all wrote comedy or stand up first, and I’m struggling to think of other examples not like them apart from Osman. Oh, I know, Reverend Richard Coles (but he was a songwriter, no?). I’m sure there are others, but you’re right nearly everyone who leaps to mind and has clearly written their own novels (as opposed to using a ghost) was previously a successful writer of some sort.
Why are there no US equivalents? (Or are there, and I’m missing them?)
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