I couldn't imagine my life without a book. Since childhood I have read for pleasure, for transport, for the pure delight of getting lost in a story, perhaps a tale of adventure that might take place in a far off country, or in a part of my own country or region, which I enter inter willingly and often breathlessly in the pages of a book. I read to learn about other people and places, about things I know nothing about — particle physics, plate tectonics, Medieval painting. I love to immerse myself in biography, in the stories of the lives of writers, artists, scientists, politicians. Reading biography allows me to learn not only about the people whose lives interest me, but about the times they lived in, the art or craft they practice. Stories of coming of age, of self-discovery fascinate me because we are ever coming of age and finding ourselves, or new facets of ourselves. And I read poetry to immerse myself in the consciousness of another artist, to see other angles of vision on the world, or to enter into the meditative space of a thoughtful person.

I also read to write, as Olson wrote, quoting Melville. I'm inspired to put words down by practically everything I read. If I'm writing fiction, I like to read fiction; likewise, non- fiction. Reading primes the pump for me. It also teaches me how to write, how to approach a particular scene I want to create or a topic I'd like to address. I'll often ask myself, "How would Flaubert describe this encounter?" or "How would Sven Birkerts lead me through this exercise in criticism?"

From early childhood I've loved to sit in a corner by myself and read for hours, lost in words, in images, in the struggles of others. As I grew older I read to learn, as I'm doing just now in reading Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, one of the most incredible accounts of survival (or non-survival) in a totalitarian society I've read. While I'm reading Figes at night, at odd moments during the day I'm also reading Roberto Bolano's 2666, a stunning novel that helps me to understand what some of my contemporaries are writing and how they are writing. It's nothing for me to have several books going at the same time. While I'm reading Figes and Bolano I'm also reading a couple of critical studies about Hemingway's lifelong fascination with cross-gender behavior. I read TLS each week, The London Review, the New York Review, the New Yorker and dozens of national and international newspapers and magazines online. But only a book satisfies my deepest need to read.

As to why others read, I would say that they are captivated by narrative as I am. Though fewer people are said to be buying literary fiction today, the rise of book clubs is a healthy sign that reading isn't dead. Literary book clubs bring people together to read and discuss demanding texts. It was by a friend who belongs to a local book club that I was inspired to begin reading Bolano, whom I'd long known about but hadn't got around to reading. Others get their books online by downloading or reading them on a Kindle. Young people are reading the Harry Potter books the way an earlier generation read Tolkein or we read Jules Verne.

To be sure TV and the digital technologies are cutting into the world of books and printed texts, but so did radio and movies for my generation. An immersion in the immediate gratifications of the visual and the digital may inhibit a young person when it comes to the book, undermining the habit of print: but I know a young woman with only a high school education who works as a cashier in my local fruit and vegetable market. She's always reading — good books, too — The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, Tolstoy — and she loves to talk about books, recommending them to customers, eagerly asking others what they are reading. And when I go to the public library I'm always running into people who are either returning or taking out literally stacks of books at a time — and not just mysteries and self-help texts. Many are reading substantial fiction and non-fiction. So I wouldn't write the book off yet, or those who love to read. It's possible that fewer people read poetry — I read it less these days than I did when I was younger; but when books like Jack Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me or Jack Hirschman's Arcanes come to hand, as they recently have, I realize how important poetry is to me and I immerse myself in it with the same fervor and excitement that I read Pound and Williams as an undergraduate.

Yes, the society has been dumbed down by the inanities of TV sit-coms and reality shows, by leaders who lack critical intelligence, by school systems that teach to achievements tests rather than challenging kids to think, read and write for themselves, as I was by my teachers. And trade publishers are tied to the bottom line and the demands of their accounting departments as never before. Their editors seek novelty rather than demanding new books; and if a serious writer isn't making them any money he or she is dropped from their lists. These are hard times for writers, and, by extension, for readers as the flow of good new books is inhibited. A society that doesn't support its best writers and artists, its libraries, is a society in decline.

Only recently my local public library junked its card catalogue, which contained records, many of them hand-written, on individual books going back to the 19th century. That paved the way for what the library director called the "weeding" of the collection. This weeding entailed de-accessioning more than half of the collection. Aside from certain "classics," approved by the Library Association for retention in public libraries, books that had not been signed out for five years were tossed directly into a dumpster; others were put on sale at "a buck a back," including a first edition of The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats and the novels of Wright Morris, also in first editions. When I reproached the director for depriving the citizens of Gloucester of their literary heritage, his response was, "I'm not running an archive." He's gone now, but so are most of the books I grew up on, including Zimmer' Philosophies of India. This has been happening all over the country, so that the public library, once the central place of education for working people, indeed for all Americans who weren't affiliated with colleges or universities, is now a shadow of its former glory, and again, we end up dumbed down further and deprived of our freedom of inquiry.