So Many Snobs, So Little Sense

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.

Okay, so here's the latest from the world of literary snobbery on the Kindle: only lovers of literature have them, not lowly genre readers.

This is a direct quote from Sara Nelson, author of “So Many Books, So Little Time.” (Which I have on my bookshelf and mostly read, until I got really bored.) She says: “It’s really expensive. If you’re going to pay that, you’re giving a statement to the world that you like to read — and you’re probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.”

Okay then.

Clearly Sara lives under a rock, or perhaps just under a stack of books. The first person I knew to own a Kindle, and that was the original Kindle, is my long time friend and sorority sister, Karen Weesner. Who gobbles up lots of books every week, many of them trashy mass market paperbacks. Once of the first things she told me she loved about it was that no one knew what she was reading. No slutty covers to elicit questions from the kids. No raised eyebrows from her husband, wondering why she was reading that one yet again.

Not everyone wants the world to know what they're reading and not everyone who loves to read invests only in highbrow stuff.

Apparently Sara doesn't know the latest statistics. Romance fiction sold $1.375 billion in estimated revenue for 2007 compared to $466 million for classic literary fiction. Umm...something makes me think these readers might have money to invest in a Kindle.

This makes me think of those articles where they ask famous people what they're reading right now. Even as a pre-teen, I wondered when I saw one of those articles, how everyone could be reading "A Tale of Two Cities," or "Les Miserables" in the original French. Where were the readers of Anne McCaffrey? As my life went on, I would scan these sorts of lists, hoping someone would fess up to the new Nora Roberts in her purse.

No one ever has.

Me? Right now I'm reading Veronica by Mary Gaitskill and Wicked Game by Jeri Smith-Ready. On the Kindle I just finished Nalini Singh's Angel's Blood and I've got JR Ward's Lover Avenged queued up.

I love 'em all.