No One Cares About Your Reading

The New York Observer observes a book reading and is bored.

From the piece...

The reader, a prominent magazine editor, had been staring at a stack of computer paper and talking softly for 30 minutes. He was the last reader. The night had begun at 8:00 and it was already well past 10:00. The room was crowded and hot. The bar was unreachable. The audience, following protocol and remaining silent, exchanged restive looks that suggested mutiny, checking the time every minute in disbelief. Forty-five minutes passed. The reading continued.

Is it a coincidence that this is how parents get their children to go to sleep? It is a dark fate, indeed, the reading that drags on and on, where the only person who has lost interest more than the audience is the author, the room lost in a purgatory of pauses for laughter, met by awkward silences.

“What really drives me crazy is that kind of readers’ cadence that everyone adapts,” said Andy Hunter, one of the editors of Electric Literature, which throws some of New York’s better literary events. “It’s like two beats down and then one beat up. It’s like some kind of profound way that—I’m gonna try to do it,” and here the inflection in his voice began to change: “People think this will make people understand that they mean this so much. Writers aren’t performers. Most writers are introverted people who didn’t have friends in high school and ended up writing books.” While these turgid, awkward, too-often sexless events are an evil necessity, not enough people enjoy them to justify their existence.