From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
All Those Words
And so little time to read them.
This week Bill Clinton signed a deal to write a book. George W. Bush, some of his detractors will surely sneer, decided to read one.
Yes, somewhere in between the running, fishing, barbecuing and maintenance work that the president says he wants to get done at his Texas ranch, Mr. Bush has declared his intention to read David McCullough's best-selling biography of John Adams, the senior half of the only other father-son presidential duo in American history. But unless he reads at the apocryphal 1,200 words a minute once attributed to JFK, the president will likely need every spare moment of his month-long sojourn to get through all 736 pages.
The "unread bestseller" has been remarked upon at least as far back as the Renaissance. In recent times, publishing watchers cite Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" as examples of the genre. But if book sales and length continue their trends, the incidence of the phenomenon can only grow.
Of course, what gets read is a hard thing to measure. Back in 1985, The New Republic sent members of its staff to visit Washington bookstores, where they placed coupons redeemable for cash within the pages of books including Strobe Talbott's long "Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control," then popular with the city's power elite. Not one coupon came back.
Another idea is to try to figure out what can possibly be getting read. A little math helps. Add up the time an average professional might spend working, commuting, eating, caring for kids, watching TV and doing chores, and even a very serious reader might be left with an hour a day during the week and two hours each for Saturday and Sunday. Recognize further that, despite the claims of some speed-reading enthusiasts, very few of us can read more than 300 words a minute with a reasonable level of comprehension.
Now let's consider Mr. Tadié's book on Proust, a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle award and one of those volumes fashionable folks like to have on their shelves. Its dust jacket starts with this quote from Virginia Woolf: "My great adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What is there left to write after that?" But such a dilemma didn't trouble Mr. Tadié, who found nearly 800 pages (before index) and nearly 400,000 words (I estimate) to say about his subject. A reader taking in 300 words a minute would have to put in some 22 hours--more than two weeks for our very dedicated reader, even if he avoided all newspapers and magazines. For those of us who can spare, say, 30 minutes a weekday and two hours on weekends, we're looking at about five weeks.
Mr. Tadié's work may be every bit as "masterful" (Publisher's Weekly) and "tightly written, relentless" (Washington Post) as the critics claim. But beyond a few specialists, it's probably not very much read. I, for one, would rather spend that kind of time reading Proust on Proust.
On balance, this abundance of print seems benign. A culture in which the arts and letters are not prized at all would be worse than one in which some people pretend to appreciate them. And if it takes a few poseurs to help sustain the arts and letters (did the Medicis really understand Michelangelo?), who are we to complain? There can be no question, moreover, that many of us buy the books we don't read with the best of intentions.
Still, it can be fun to prick the pomposity of verbose authors and those who pretend to have read them. And perhaps no one has done that better than yet another president: Ronald Reagan. With characteristic modesty he once told Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek: "Many people have told me how important your books are." It's a safe bet he never read Strobe Talbott's diatribe against him either.
Mr. Pollock is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
