According to a recent AP poll, 25% of Americans didn’t read a book in the last year. Over at the Guardian Books Blog, it’s posited that capitalism is to blame for the mass aversion to the printed page that so many Americans seem to have developed. I think that’s an oversimplification of what’s really going on. To be sure, reading–and I want to emphasize that we’re talking about books here–has never been a popular American pastime. Credit the vociferous anti-intellectualism that took root here as soon as the Puritans dropped anchor. Credit the agrarian economy that dominated the first half of the nation’s history (reading can’t be a priority when there are crops to be sown). Books might have become mass entertainment if the industrial revolution hadn’t been immediately followed by the advent of radio and then television.

Some might point out that the Web and videogames and television turned people away from books. Maybe. Perhaps technology finally reached a point where it could satiate a human brain hungry for visual stimulation. Why make the effort to process words into images when the TV is sitting right there, ready to mainline all kinds of pretty pictures into our cerebral cortexes? The siren call of the TV is hardwired into our neural pathways. The decline of reading is just as much about biology as anything else.

But books and the reading of books will survive. Despite the best efforts of a broken educational system and a mass culture that is becoming ever more hyper-visual, a significant minority of people–yes, even Americans–will continue to take refuge and solace in books. A certain kind of person will cling to the permanence of the stories and ideas presented in books as a way to keep one’s bearings in an age of ephemera and disposability.

Lee Child puts his own spin on the lone-hero archetype in The Hard Way, one of the latest books in Child’s series of books that feature Jack Reacher. Reacher is an ex-military cop who has a knack for finding trouble. In this book, Reacher gets involved with the investigation of a mercenary’s trophy wife. Reacher soon discovers that said mercenary doesn’t possess many redeeming qualities, even for a mercenary, and Reacher begins to suspect foul play.

The narrative moves along at a brisk pace without inducing seeming far-fetched, which is a common pitfall for the thriller genre. There isn’t much in the way of character development, but that really isn’t the point in books like these. It’s all about plot twists, which Child delivers in a well-crafted manner. When I’m in the mood for another breezy read, I’ll be happy to return to the world of Jack Reacher.

Next up is The Store, Bentley Little’s critique of consumerism disguised as a horror novel.

My first posting for the BBC can be found here. You want to know the great thing about blogging for two sites simultaneously? You get to stare at a blank screen for twice as much time, desperately trying to think of something clever to say for two audiences. Before long, I’ll develop a crushing form of performance anxiety that can only be remedied by copious amounts of illicit narcotics. And the only thing that will stop my rapid downward spiral is an intervention where my friends and family force me to put my computer up for sale on Craigslist.

I’m leaving tomorrow for a short business trip to Duluth. Blogging probably won’t resume until Wednesday. But here’s a bit of news to tide you over: beginning August 23, I’ll be guest-blogging on the BBC Ouch site for the next weeks. No, I don’t why they asked me, either. But the British are known for their appreciation of both quirkiness (see Eddie Izzard or any season of Doctor Who) and crotchety-ness (see Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens), so maybe I’ll fit right in. I’ll still be doing my regular 19th Floor blogging, which means you can still get your dose of my vulgar Mr. Hyde while my genteel Dr. Jeckyll is trying to be all mannered and cultured for the Beeb.

Here’s an interesting post describing various ideas to assist people with locked-in syndrome to communicate. People who have locked-in syndrome are completely paralyzed, oftentimes unable to even move their eyes. The closest I’ve ever come to being unable to communicate was when I was hospitalized as a kid and had a ventilator tube shoved down my throat. The inability to direct someone to the exact spot of an itch or to emphatically state “No, I do not want to watch another MASH rerun” could be incredibly frustrating. The hospital staff did develop a laminated communication board that let me whine and complain by pointing at letters, but it was an excruciatingly slow and cumbersome method. I invented my own system of tongue clicks and facial gestures to communicate simple concepts and some of those adaptive behaviors have become deeply ingrained. To this day, I flutter my eyebrows when I’m saying “yes”.