Last exit to book land

So in 2005, I became what may turn out to be the last full-time book critic in America to leave his job voluntarily for anything other than semiretirement. Since my departure, the Chronicle certainly hasn't felt the urge to find a new one. To that newspaper, as to almost every other paper in America, a book critic is like a fancy antique car -- almost a relief when it finally gives out. They cost so much to insure.

What I left book reviewing to do isn't, I hope, completely irrelevant to this conversation. I joined the NEA mostly to direct a new initiative called the Big Read, which aims to restore reading to the heart of American life. Under it, cities and towns apply to run a one-city, one-book program, sometimes called a CityRead. Since their earliest annual incarnations in Seattle and Chicago a decade or so ago, CityReads have brought people together to celebrate and argue about all sorts of books in a kind of monthlong festival. Bookstores sell the chosen title like crazy, libraries check it out by the hundreds, and suddenly strangers have something in common more interesting to talk about than the weather.

Only problem is, not every city or town is blessed with a library budget the size of Chicago's or Seattle's. (Jackson County, Ore., is voting on a measure this month just to keep its libraries' lights on.) So the NEA hatched the Big Read, whereby burgs as small as Wallowa County, Ore. (population 7,000), or as big as Miami choose a book from our growing list and apply for a modest chunk of the green and crinkly. On top of the grant, we create and ship readers and teachers guides and educational CDs of a caliber that most communities might never manage on their own. Our growing menu of books to choose from started out looking fairly canonical -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck -- but lately everybody from Dashiell Hammett to Cynthia Ozick is crashing the party.

I bring all this up for two reasons, one big, the other enormous. First, none of the 21 writers so far on the Big Read list would be there if it weren't for timely attention from at least a couple of long-forgotten book reviewers. Where would Steinbeck be -- a man so unpersuaded of his own genius that he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and then seriously considered becoming a marine biologist -- if not for early championing by another San Francisco Chronicle book critic, Joseph Henry Jackson. More important, where would American literature be without all the great writers who got a leg up from a smart critic when they needed it most?

Still, as important as the crisis in American book reviewing is, the underlying crisis in reading is practically sawing the country in half. Forget red states and blue states. The implications of a republic where half reads and the other doesn't -- not can't, just doesn't -- are simply horrifying.

This would all be bad enough if it weren't for one further filthy secret: Too many of us, subconsciously, like it this way. By "us," I mean the people who still read books, book reviews, newspapers and, yes, Salon. There's a furtive, beleaguered, unacknowledged glamour in feeling like the last bastion of civilization, the saving remnant beset on all sides by the forces of ignorance and greed. Who lives for baseball more than a Cubs fan? Everybody loves a lost cause -- sometimes so much that we forget to fight for it.

But the fight to get America reading again is too important, the stakes too high, to resign ourselves to failure. That's why I'm about to abandon all pretense of seemliness and exhort everybody within sight of this page not just to join the NBCC's campaign to save book reviewing but to help bring a Big Read to town. Agitate for book reviews, absolutely, but while you're at it visit neabigread.org and help your local library or nonprofit pull off a Big Read. Over and over, what makes the program work every time is the dedication of all the volunteers and librarians and teachers and, frequently, newspaper people who pitch in.

It would be so easy to wax cynical about high-minded, uphill campaigns like ours and the NBCC's. Take it from me, dyspepsia used to be my stock in trade. But imagine a country where readers aren't even a minority, but an aberration. Picture a country where newspapers gut book coverage and everything else that made them worth saving in the first place -- like Fogg at the end of "Around the World in Eighty Days," burning his own boat piecemeal for fuel. Imagine all that, and pretty soon writing a letter to the editor, or helping gin up a Big Read application for spring by the July 31 deadline, starts to look less like a sacrifice and more like a mitzvah.

OK, so enough guilt, already. That flight attendant is still waiting: "May I take your newspapers?" The question only chafes because something so precious to us looks, to the attendant, as disposable as the foil bag your honey-roasted peanuts came in. But it's not the attendant's fault if nobody ever showed him or her that a decent paper and its readers can knock an autocrat off the throne, or put an unheralded writer on the map. So the next time that attendant asks to take your newspapers, instead of your wanting to snap, "No, you may not," maybe something a tad more conciliatory is in order. Something along the lines of "No, but you can borrow them." Or my new, less obnoxious comeback: "All except the book page. I'm not done with that yet."

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