Welcome to the 146th edition of SHuSH, the weekly newsletter of Sutherland House Books. Hit the button—it’s free:
Our periodic reminder that Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for non-fiction books. While we are based in Toronto, we publish writers from around the world. If you are looking to get published, or know someone who is, tell them to contact ken@sutherlandhousebooks.com. No agent required.
I was having coffee this week with a former star journalist who now (like so many) works in a journalist-adjacent industry. “Who reads books?” she wondered.
It’s a question I’m often asked by journalists who these days get a lot of their information from Twitter. The chore of keeping up with their feed leaves little time for anything else. My guest still read books and belongs to a book club, but she asked the question all the same.
According to the authorities at the PEW Institute, 77% of Americans read books in 2021 (or, to be more precise, read one or more books in one or more format—print, audiobook, ebook). That’s not bad considering only 86% of American adults can read.
Only 21% of women read no books, and 26% of men. Eighty per cent of white people read books (as compared to 62% of Hispanics).
Good news for the future of book reading: 81% of adults under the age of fifty read books compared to 72% of adults over the age of fifty.
More on the demographics: 69% of those earning less than $30,000 a year read books, while 85% of those earning over $75,000 read books; 61% of those with a high-school (or less) education read books; 89% of college graduates read books.
According to PEW, the average reader manages twelve a year.
There is some evidence that reading is a declining habit: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average time spent reading for pleasure declined from twenty-three minutes a day to seventeen minutes a day from 2005 to 2017. But the least decline was among young adults, 18 to 34 (less than 1%).
In fact, there is good evidence that the much-maligned millennials read more than their parents, and they overwhelmingly prefer hard copies to digital books. Even better, the millennials pay for their books:
A worrisome stat for those of us in the business is the annual consumer expenditure on books, which was solid at the beginning of the century, took a hit after the financial crisis, and has failed to recover:
The Canadian stats are inconsistent. A 2020 BookNet survey found that 68% of Canadians read books in late 2019, and 72% in the first half of 2020, which would make us less interested in books than Americans (I have trouble believing that).
A recent Ipsos survey, by contrast, found that only 17% of Canadians don’t have a book underway at any given time, and 34% have two or more going. The same report found that more Canadians read books than newspapers or magazines or blogs, and that four times as many people are looking to increase their book reading time than to decrease it.
If you’re like me and more inclined to trust retail data than self-reported surveys of reading habits, unit sales of printed books in the US have been steady for the last twenty years (except for a dip after the financial crisis and a spike in the time of COVID):
Again, Canadian data are less robust but the trends appear to be similar.
While we’re dumping data, here’s another chart from Canada’s BookNet that shows where people are buying their books:
You can see here that physical books remain the most popular format, although audio is gaining fast:
And if you’re a Canadian nationalist, or a reader concerned for the health of the Canadian-owned publishing sector, the building of which has been a government of Canada priority for almost sixty years, here’s the really depressing data. Roughly 95% of the sales go to foreign-owned publishers:
The decline of the book section
A good piece in the recent Maisonneuve magazine by Emily Keeler, former books editor at the National Post, on what’s become of her former trade:
The Globe and Mail, which once had its own dedicated pull-out print section for book reviews on Saturdays, now runs on average a single review per week. (One recent selection for coverage in the sole review spot: the $64.00, 800-page George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, a book that absolutely everyone is talking about and that surely most Canadians have special ordered in from Random House UK, as it has no Canadian publisher.) Sometimes the review is actually an interview, often with an American journalist, or a three-book roundup of mostly nonfiction books with a timely plug. The Toronto Star runs a few short book reviews each weekend, with the occasional longer review or author profile. The National Post no longer has a books section, though it did once—section editors emeriti include Jessica Johnson, who now edits the Walrus, Mark Medley, the deputy editor of the Globe’s Opinion section, and yours truly...
That’s just the newspapers, of course. Maclean’s has dedicated books coverage, though not necessarily reviews so much as profiles and themed lists, in each issue. There are a handful of smaller circulation magazines with a focus on reviewing books in this country, like the Literary Review of Canada, Quill & Quire, and Canadian Notes & Queries, but they tend toward, shall we say, niche readerships and small contributor’s fees.
Indeed, the three smaller publications she mentions all have smaller monthly readerships than SHuSH, and we’re not exactly the New York Times. We wrote about the Quill losing its last critic last year. There are also at least fifty small-time literary journals in Canada, most of them publishing two to four issues a year, most of them with followings you could seat around a table.
Of course, it’s not just literary journalism that’s dying. It’s arts journalism generally. Canadian Art, the last Canadian magazine devoted to the visual arts, was put out of its misery in 2021. It is exceedingly difficult to find original reporting or critical writing on painting, music, dance, opera, or theatre anywhere in Canadian media.
The Globe had a daily arts section until 2017. This is what it was offering in its arts section last night. One guy writing on the same TV shows everyone else is writing about:
The Globe, in fairness, also has a movie critic, Barry Hertz, and Kate Taylor is its do-it-all arts policy, books, visual arts reporter. There are one or two others but the paper’s contribution to the Canadian arts-and-letters conversation is negligible.
The Toronto Star is no better. Two years ago, it slashed its arts & entertainment department. The classical music site Ludwig Van Toronto keeps tabs:
Peter Howell, Toronto Star Movie Critic — Leaving Feb. 2020.
Tony Wong, Toronto Star TV Critic — Leaving Feb. 2020.
Ben Rayner, Toronto Star Music Critic — Reassigned.
Debra Yeo, Toronto Star Entertainment Editor — Reassigned.
Garnett Fraser, Toronto Star Entertainment Editor — Reassigned.
The Star still has a theatre critic and classical music critic who (according to Ludwig Van) is “funded externally from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.” And Deborah Dundas, god bless her, does yeoman's work at the Star covering everything related to book and publishing as a reporter/reviewer/editor. Publishing types have a pool predicting the day on which she’ll spontaneously combust.
The National Post cut most of its original arts coverage years ago.
Of course, it’s not altogether the fault of these newspapers and magazines (and certainly not the fault of the remaining editors and reporters who are pulled in a million different directions and doing what they can with few resources). The business models of newspapers and magazines got blown up. Most arts and letters organizations don’t have enough money to advertise, and arts coverage never scores particularly high in surveys of why people subscribe to newspapers and magazines. (TV and movies still get most of the arts coverage because they attract the largest audiences and their industries still do some advertising.) That said, more could be done.
As an aside, I wondered if the Canada Council was concerned about the collapse of arts journalism in Canada. I looked at its recently-published five-year strategic report and… nothing. The issue doesn’t register. Lots of talk about climate change, tho.
John Fraser is among the living
Last week we wrote about the late Fraser Sutherland and, in passing, my old friend John Fraser, his love of all things funereal, and my estimation that he’d make an excellent funeral reviewer. I mentioned that people at Fraser Sutherland’s memorial/book launch were concerned when the always reliable John Fraser didn’t show and were planning to put his face on a milk carton.
No need. He writes:
I actually once tried to write a short story about a guy who checked out the Globe obits every day to choose which funeral he wanted to crash. My idea was that he would be a connoisseur not just of eulogies (he would come to know that few people ever spent much time talking about the dearly departed and instead rhapsodized on the departed’s wonderful influence on their own amazingly successful career and life). My funeral crasher would also become an expert on the best funeral reception sandwiches (the ones at Mount Pleasant Cemetery reception hall—between the pool of remembrance and the forest of eternal bliss—were best because the great WASP establishment that it is, the crusts were all cut.
FYI, I was going to come to the reception for Sutherland but had it down for [Friday]. I get things quite mixed up these days thanks fo the deficits of aging. You will get to write my obituary, too, and I hope you will remember that I picked you up from the Trough of Despond in lonely Alberta, dusted you off, and sent you along a right pathway.”
What to do on Saturday
Most weeks we include our map of Canadian independent bookstores, and you can find it below this week. Pay special attention to it because Saturday is:
Click this link to make the above map come alive.
Better yet, click here for the Sutherland House website and order one of these:
Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading
Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.
Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.
Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.
Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff
Jeet Heer’s The Time of Monsters: political culture and cultural politics
Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.
Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.
Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)
Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different
Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion
Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world
Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations
Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice
John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations
THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK. THANKS FOR READING. PLEASE SIGN UP OR CONVINCE SOMEONE ELSE TO SIGN UP, OR SHARE, OR LEAVE A COMMENT:
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