Willy Wylie's Profile

One mildly depressing finding of the survey is that the only increase in putatively literary activity is in the realm of creative writing. "In 1982, about 11 million people did some form of creative writing. By 2002, this number had risen to almost 15 million people (18 or older), an increase of about 30 percent."

An earlier survey, run by a vanity-press company, claimed that 80 percent of Americans felt they had a book in them, which is also, in my view, bad news.

first, that in its findings the quality of the reading being done is not taken into consideration; and, second, neither has serious nonfiction been tabulated

The thought that 96 million people in our happily philistine country are regularly reading literature, even though it might represent a decline over 20 years earlier, would still be impressive, except for the fact that we don't know how many of them are reading, not to put too fine a point on it, crap.

My own speculation is that our speeded-up culture--with its FedEx, fax, email, channel surfing, cell-phoning, fast-action movies, and other elements in its relentless race against boredom--has ended in a shortened national attention span. The quickened rhythms of new technology are not rhythms congenial to the slow and time-consuming and solitary act of reading. Sustained reading, sitting quietly and enjoying the aesthetic pleasure that words elegantly deployed on the page can give, contemplating careful formulations of complex thoughts--these do not seem likely to be acts strongly characteristic of an already jumpy new century.

People who openly declare themselves passionate readers are, like Eubanks, usually chiefly stating their own virtue, and hence superiority, and hence, though they are unaware of it, snobbery

I adore reading," I have had people tell me, and then go from there to reveal that much of what they read is schlock, and of a fairly low order even for schlock. Young parents who read to their infant children are always delighted to report that the kids are mad for books; they take it as a sign, a premonition of brilliance and success ahead.

But is it, immitigably and always? Surely everything depends upon what is being read and the degree of perspicacity brought to the task. Even so powerful a reader as Samuel Johnson claimed that his indulgent reading of romances deepened his plunge into depression.

When you are reading, after all, you are, ipso facto, not raping or pillaging. But might you as easily be wasting your time?

The argument that reading even junk is intrinsically a fine thing is a reverse on the old slippery-slope argument. Instead of slipping downward, the reverse-slippery-slope argument here holds that the reading of junky books is likely to lead in time to the reading of good ones. But literary culture has no supply side; it trickles neither down nor up.

If one ever wishes to retain one's fantasies about the good sense of the people in the realm of literary taste, one does best never to consult the bestseller lists.

To me the shock isn't the discovery that Americans are reading less; it is the knowledge that we read as much as we do, though no one can say, with any precision, how much of this reading is really serious.

many more feel vastly insecure, sure they haven't read enough books, or the right books. They are even more certain that they will never catch up, and one day arrive at that august condition known as being "well-read."

Anyone who has been bedeviled by feeling inadequate about his reading will take comfort, I hope, in Gertrude Stein's remark that the happiest day of her life was the day on which she realized she could not read even all the world's good books.

More and more books are published every year, which further complicates things, with bad books Greshamly helping to drive out good. According to R.R. Bowker, the firm that compiles the database for Books in Print, the number of books published last year was a shelf-groaning 175,000, an increase of 19 percent over the previous year, despite the decline in reading generally and the reported flatness of book sales.

. For as the greatest authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the particular--where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess

Wikipedia's English-language version doubled in size last year and now has over 1m articles. By this measure, it is almost 12 times larger than the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Taking in the other 200-odd languages in which it is published, Wikipedia has more than 3m articles.

A common assumption, expressed most cuttingly by Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that Wikipedians trust in “some unspecified quasi-Darwinian” process, whereby accuracy “evolves” as more and more “eyeballs” examine an item

. “Does someone actually believe this?”, wonders Mr McHenry. He obviously does not. To him, Wikipedia is a “faith-based encyclopedia”, based on “the moist and modish notion of community and some vague notions about information wanting to be free”.

Instead, says Mr Wales, the process “is much more traditional than people realise”. Fewer than 1% of all users do half the total edits. They add up to a few hundred committed volunteers like himself

Besides “democracy” on the site, he says, there is occasional “aristocracy” (when editors with superior reputations get more say than others) and even occasional “monarchy” (“that's my role”) in cases such as the Seigenthaler biography, when quick intervention is needed.

Nature's experts found 162 errors in Wikipedia's articles and 123 errors in Britannica's.

Dale Hoiberg, Britannica's current editor-in-chief

puts a brave face on it, claiming that “our model, although not perfect, is the best.”