But in fact Wyoming should be to reading what the cliffs at Wild Iris are to climbing – inviting, challenging, un-crowded, with few of the modern distractions that ruin concentration.

 

   Lately, prophets from Ursula LeGuin to the National Endowment for the Arts are telling us reading and books are near death, infected by flashy electronic media with terminal attention deficit disorder. If so, perhaps our state might be a sanatorium for literacy recovery – a peaceful place to withdraw from cultural speed. Our tourism promotions might even use this to advantage, replacing the incessant images of Tetons with a comfy leather chair by a log fire (okay, if you must, put those beaux nichons in the window).

 

   But my own five-year, 800-page study of Wyoming readers (http://www.Imonlykidding.com) suggests we're in trouble here, too. Though Wyoming has recently held several ballyhooed book festivals, if you look around the room at these gatherings (which I did, except at the one where I failed to show up), you see, yes, a fairly sizable crowd, but, with some minor variations of gender and weight and bad fashion taste, they all look like ... me. That is, older.

 

I asked Laurie Lye and Tom Rea (Equality State Book Festival) and Susan Vittitow (Wyoming Book Festival) if my impression was right: in Wyoming as elsewhere, is it just the old puds reading books, while the pups toss the leather-bound Keats and dive into a maelstrom of television and texting and brain chips or whatever else has virtually absorbed them?

 

   Vittitow gamely argues that it’s not that bad. Nationwide, library book circulation is growing (slightly), and a survey of people at the Wyoming Book Festival last year indicated over 80 percent of them brought their children along. And, "There's a lot of reading that goes on with a screen," she says.

   Lye is a little less optimistic. In 2006 the Equality State Book Festival got the schools to send young people to their gathering by headlining Olympic star Rulon Gardner, who had written a book (or, at least, had someone write a book with his name on it). But the kids don't find refuge in the printed word the way their forebearers did. Lye describes it: "The old love for actually holding the book that has a feel and smell in your hand, and that ambience that's created by loving a book."

 

   In our schools, we find children more skilled at navigating a video game than a paragraph, and our would-be Tolstoys shoot for easier audiences with shorter-attention-span snippets like, well, columns on the internet. Brains, which have had only a few centuries to adjust to the written word, are re-wiring. The world moves into a new era of visual/oral literacy, what linguist Walter Ong calls "secondary orality" (referring to the pre-literate "primary orality" before Homer's time).
And we're left to wonder: as books molder and rot, or get shelved in the mega-depths of some giant literary hard drive, will the textured intellectual connections they provided to the past, and the alchemy they performed on the brain's imaginative sectors, be missed or forgotten? Will the public tire of harboring unproductive readers, and send them off to some island – neutered, so they won't produce more nattering scholars? And what becomes, Lord help us, of writers?

 

Despite evidence that book-reading has declined sharply in the last decade, LeGuin ends her Harper's rant on a note of optimism: "But I also want to question the assumption - whether gloomy or faintly gloating - that books are on the way out. I think they're here to stay. It's just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?"

 

   Perhaps because we're able to, and it just might make society more just and productive. Sure, reading were a century or two ago, but that was when the privilege of reading was reserved to the upper classes, a tool that gave them control of governance and most commerce. Spreading literacy to the masses was viewed in the nineteenth century as an engine of progress and democracy. It meant Abe Lincoln and many others of lesser means could teach themselves and communicate with great minds they could never meet. And reading offered a particular kind of intellectual growth. "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends," wrote Charles Eliot in 1896, "they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."

   In April, Central Wyoming College hosted Theresa Jordan, the writer of fine, nuanced books, often set in Wyoming, like Riding the White Horse Home (Pantheon). Because the Wyoming Council for the Humanities helped fund her reading, they distributed a survey afterward to gauge the audience and their reaction. Though the setting was a community college awash in young people, the survey revealed that 70 percent of those attending were 50 years or older, according to librarian Carol Deering.

   The percentages would have been even worse if I'd driven over from Lander – another 50-something – but I missed it. I greatly admire her writing, and the subjects she's chosen. But the weather was iffy, and it was one of those Wyoming nights when you just want to curl up next to the fire ... with a good movie from Netflix.

Wyoming Reads Week:  Starts on May 20, 2008.  Information Here.