Where have all the readers gone?

Does anyone read any more?

The conundrum isn’t all that puzzling, really — after all, I do live in Los Angeles. This is home of the entertainment business, not a literary mecca like New York or San Francisco. And yet I find myself asking the same questions each day. How can people not read books? I can’t imagine a life without them. Living in L.A. makes me yearn for a community of serious readers.

Literature seems even more valuable when you’ve spent time away from it. A couple of years ago, I was devoting all my time to improv comedy theatre, rehearsing with my team, watching shows, and performing at least once a week. I loved every minute of it, but something was missing. There was a void in me so deep that I began questioning everything around me. What am I doing? Why am I here? These are questions that I’m sure everyone has pondered at some point, but for me, the more I asked, the further I descended to an abyss of utter madness. Life felt like one heavy burden that I couldn’t lift.

I then realized something: I had stopped reading.

I looked through my bookshelf and pulled out Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, How to be Alone. I had read it while I was in college, and reading it again, I remembered why I’ve always wanted to be a writer and why I love books. Reading allows one to connect with a community he or she may not be able to find elsewhere.

Franzen asks, “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

It’s a question I’m sure many writers and readers will continue to ponder.