Didion: No One Reads Novels; Book Sales Down 18% YTD

Add Joan Didion, 76, to the list of old writers making blanket statements about not reading fiction. Last week, promoting her new memoir Blue Nights [[Kindle]], she said, "Writing a novel, which is what I thought I'd like to do, turns out to be not very gratifying in the end because nobody reads them any more."

Nobody who? Oh, maybe she means Philip Roth, 78, who last June announced, “I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all...I've wised up." The same month, John Banville, 65, admitted, “I find I have no use for fiction any more.”

Overall, sales of all adult hardcovers and paperbacks fell 11% and 6% in August. Year to date, 2011 sales are down a steep 18% in both categories compared to 2010. Ebook sales are up 144% ytd.

Comments

[Duncan]

That might be a life-cycle thing. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote when he was in his 70s that he found he was reading mostly in search of new information, new facts. But then he mostly wrote nonfiction anyway.

In "American Plastic," his 1974 essay on American experimental fiction writers Gore Vidal was working from a book of interviews with them, I believe, and he said that several of these guys said that they didn't like fiction and rarely read it. So this may not be a new trend.

At 60, I still read a mix of fiction and nonfiction, and my only complaint is that there's not more time. But my impression of the 'ordinary' reader, based on what my southern Indiana coworkers read, is that they read mostly fiction, though not "literary" fiction. Heroic fantasy, romances, mysteries, horror fiction, science fiction, maybe historical fiction now and then, with the very occasional nonfiction bestseller, like "Eat Pray Love."

[Cynthia]

This just pisses me off.