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Readings: what are they good for?

Author Mik Awake, writing in The New York Inquirer, asks a perennial question:

I have been wondering for many years now – and I imagine that I’m not alone: what is the purpose of the literary reading? Publishers say, How else can a novelist sell books without going on tour and doing readings? Critics say, In this beleaguered age of literature, where books are quickly going the way of the dodo, we must embrace any event that celebrates literacy. But does the literary reading really help promote a book? And does it really celebrate literature – or just a certain type?

Awake notes that comic writing – not surprisingly – almost always works better in a live format, which tends to narrow down the “literary” possibilities of a literary reading. He posits a few reasons why readings may be an unwinnable proposition, but he likely hits the nail on the head here:

Reading is decidedly anti-social behavior. The freedom to read whatever we want to read is a shining legacy of our democracy, but one’s response to a book need not be democratic. One’s response is a totalitarian regime within each individual reader, morphing over time, and fighting for dominion of the imagination. In our producer-consumer version of literature, where authorial voice is a commodity for which publishers pay six-figure advances, the literary reading overlooks the single most important commodity in any literary transaction: a reader’s voice. Most writers write to be heard in that imaginary voice that comes from within a reader’s head, a natural compliment to the writer’s own. Literary readings, and perhaps even audiobooks, misunderstand where a book derives its power. It is not from the printed words on the page – the words themselves – but from the silence that surrounds them as we repeat them in our heads.

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