Yesterday we hiked in what we thought would be mist and rain and turned out to be a steady onslaught of fat snowflakes. Ernie spotted this seal washed up on the seaweed. At first I feared that it was going through some sort of end-of-life ritual, but I was later informed that it's common for seals to be stuck on shore while awaiting high tide. Kind of like missing that last train out of Penn Station...

The reason I did the post with the book and coffee was not, believe it or not, to incite my siblings to critique my milk-frothing technique, but to discuss the decline and fall of literature. Max and I have been having an on-going conversation (for years) about whether people read anymore (books not blogs). I insisted that there was a reason all those bookstores were closing; Max said people still read, but that they got all their books from Amazon.

Recently I used the book pictured in my last post to bolster my argument. I said that it used to be that there were several "big books" at a time, that Roth and Bellow and Updike, etc. could share shelf space in the great American cultural psyche. Now, it seems, we only have room for one major work a year. And this year it happens to be Jonathan Franzan's Freedom. (As a side note: many female authors have made the argument that only a male author could get this kind of attention).

This line-of-reasoning was so compelling that, at the age of 47, I won my first argument with Max. Ever. Heady experience, let me tell you. But there's more: in an essay collection (How to Be Alone) that Franzan wrote some years ago he himself made the argument that people don't read anymore. What's more, men read significantly less than women, which is why he got into the brouhaha with Oprah because he thought that having her insignia on his book jacket (for The Corrections) would turn off whatever potential male readers were out there. He was disinvited from the show for making this comment. Of course he was: the truth hurts.