Dumb Readers of Dumb Books

It is a mistake to assume that because a person likes to read or to
hang out at bookstores or websites about books, that there is anything
apt to be of real knowledge in the head of such a person.

The truth is that anybody who somehow managed to get past third grade
is a person that can read. Anybody can read books, and there are many
who read dumb books for none but the dumbest of reasons, which can
range anywhere between a will to escape from reality to fantasy; to
finding gratification for some base or puerile interest that may be
shared between many an author and his readers; or to a purely
bourgeois purpose of maintaining some phony image of pop culture
literacy by keeping current with the best seller list and the kind of
mediocre, middle-class, middle-brow interest that creates it.

You can find people who have been reading for thirty and forty years
with nothing more to show for it in their heads than the world view
and intellectual acumen of a Ian Fleming or Danielle Steel.

Reading books can be a pursuit that is no better than watching TV or
going to the movies. The market is by and large aimed at mass appeal,
which means that discernment, quality, intelligence, taste and art has
nothing to do with it, since none of those things exists en masse.

For this reason, the chance that one is apt to run into some form of
intelligent or witty conversation under a heading like
"rec.arts.books" is about as good as finding something worth watching
on TV.
--
JM