Reading Is a Mystery

This column is not about you, and it's not about me. It may be about some of your friends, in which case you need to get new friends.

The National Education Association recently commissioned a survey titled "Reading at Risk" and learned that 57% of Americans had not read a single book in a year. Just mull that over for a minute. Can you imagine going a full year and finding nothing that you needed or wanted to read? For someone who makes his living as a bookseller, publisher, and author, can you wonder why I feel that maybe I didn't make the smartest career choice? Actually, it wasn't my first career choice, which was playing center field for the New York Yankees, but that's not really the point.

There is more. The average American reads five books a year. When you factor in how many you read, and how many I read, there are a lot of folks out there pulling that average down. It's enough to make you laugh, if you don't weep instead, to learn that 27% of the pollsters acknowledged that they hadn't read even one book in the year.

A pertinent quote, often attributed to Mark Twain, is "The man who does not read good books has no advantage [over] the man who cannot read them." If you want to shudder, then, the question that leaps to mind is whether those 57% of Americans don't want to read or can't read. Neither is an attractive concept.

While we New Yorkers tend to be a trifle smug (yes, it's true — just admit it) about the fact that we read so much more than the rest of the country, here is a little pin to pop that particular balloon. Publishers Weekly, the industry publication that provides all the news that's fit to print about the world of letters, ran a weekly summary of bookselling, devoting each issue to a different state of the Union. Ranking the states according to the number of bookstores per capita, our fair state came in a lusty 50th. Yes, California, Mississippi, and Hawaii whipped our collective butt.

There is one candle burning fitfully in the wintry night. In both America and Britain, the no.1 genre is mystery fiction. Since I have long held that some of the finest literature being produced today falls within the genre for which we have so much affection, I take this as the good news. In America, if you're interested, romance ranked second, followed by general fiction, religious books, biography, espionage, fantasy, cooking, science fiction, and children's picture books, to round out the top 10. In England, popular fiction ranked second, followed by biography, adventure/thriller, children's fiction, literary fiction, maps/atlases, history, cooking, and fantasy.

To the surprise of only extraterrestrials and the brain-dead, the no. 1 selling book of the year (and unlikely to be surpassed in the next couple of months barring a direct order from God) is "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling, with more than 7.5 million copies sold. The second best-selling book, with more than 2.5 million, is Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret," which assures you that if you have positive thoughts about wealth, you will get a lot of money, proving what a nincompoop I have been all these years by just working to earn it. No other title has surpassed the three-quarters-of-a-million mark.

For many years, mystery/ crime/suspense fiction has filled half or more of the slots on weekly best-seller lists. James Patterson alone accounts for four or five titles a year, and no one can remember when they didn't include books by Robert B. Parker, Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, Dick Francis, Stuart Woods, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Robert Crais, Harlan Coben, Jeffery Deaver, and Sue Grafton, to name just a few who come to mind. The best-selling mystery novel of 2007, by the way, and believe it or not, is "To Kill a Mockingbird."

With more than 50,000 new titles published in America each year (not counting reprints or imported books), it is dumbfounding to think that not one of these books tempted any of those 160,000,000 people.

On the other hand, taking a close look at what Americans are buying in serious quantities may be eye-opening. Among recent best sellers are the elegantly titled "Skinny Bitch," which appears to owe its success (more than 350,000 copies sold) to the fact that Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) was photographed holding a copy (I'm not making this up), and "If I Did It" by O.J. Simpson, who took time out from hunting for his wife's murderer to write his version of "Crime and No-Punishment."

It's enough to make you want to stop reading.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual "Best American Mystery Stories." He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com