He wants to be
a paperback writer
However, I recently heard some study results that could truly scuttle my plans at publishing super-stardom: It seems people have stopped reading. Apparently while I wasn’t paying attention everyone decided that printed matter was passé, resulting in a dangerous lack of sales for any book that doesn’t tell you how to avoid carbs. (No one’s sure what happened, but I blame Steven King retiring, which has resulted in fewer than a dozen new Steven King books this year.)
In fact, if you look at today’s society, you can see why young people in particular might have given up on reading books, even the classics: No matter how many times you read “Doctor Zhivago,” for example, it will never tell you who got fired last night on “The Apprentice.” Someone who actually finished that book could probably confirm that for me.
With that in mind, I’ve decided I should do my best to get people reading again. At first I thought I’d point out how reading engages the imagination, promotes independent thought and produces a more involved citizenry. That’s until I found out that sending books into space is the best way to contact space aliens, which seemed like a better bet.
So here goes: Two Rutgers University professors say that transporting actual, physical writings, rather than transmitting radio waves, is probably the best way to contact extraterrestrial beings. They say that messages sent to outer space via radio waves eventually disperse to the point that the message could become garbled, which is inadvisable should “We are a peaceful people” be accidentally translated as “Please come eat us and enslave our women.” If we send books, however, there is very little chance of aliens getting anything other than the precise message we are trying to send to their highly advanced civilizations: that carbs are bad.
The alien factor aside, there are a few other tactics the publishing industry may want to consider to get young people reading more:
1) Let readers pick the ending they want via an Internet vote, and then send the winning ending on tour with all the losing endings.
2) I think even Hemingway would agree that “The Old Man and The Sea” would be that much more effective if, after reading it, you could pop “EXTREME Old Man and The Sea” into your PlayStation and annihilate virtual fish with a tremendous machine gun.
3) More characters in novels who are on low-carb diets.
I’m hoping they employ these suggestions quickly, so that reading books becomes the popular pastime it once was by the time I write mine. In the meantime, I figure I should hold up my end of the bargain by writing something that’s meaningful, thought-provoking and actually worth reading. So if you start reading again, I promise you can expect just that kind of book from me in the very near future.
(Note to editor: Sorry I’m 100 words short this week, but my head is killing me.)