Last January, I went blind in my left eye, the result of a botched cataract surgery. One of my first thoughts was will I still be able to write? It was instantly followed by will I still be able to read? The concept of life without visually intaking or outputting words, stories, and books seemed to me an unbearable tragedy. I was spared this fate by God, only to learn about too many people choosing it for themselves. A depressing new cover story by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The End of Reading is Here,” chronicles the cataclysmic decline in reading this century, which bodes ill for the rest of it.
The article cites a National Endowment for the Arts survey that found fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Just 38 percent read a novel or short story. The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.
And the books being read — like the films being released — are less intellectual than afore. “In 1958,” Horowitch wrote, “the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year … Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series.”
You might think it’s positive that at least the kids are consuming books. But what Horowitch did not note is that a large percentage of the reading adults are now reading the same YA fiction, a trend started by the Harry Potter boom at the end of the 20th Century. So, a modern totalitarian state would not have to ban a stimulative novel like the Soviet Union did Doctor Zhivago. The masses would ignore it on the bookstore shelf in favor of the current adult fiction best-seller, Onyx Storm — part of the women-driven “romantasy” series, Empyrean.
That so many boys today will never know that experience — or later cherish memories of it — is truly lamentable.
Amazon MGM Studios is currently preparing a small-screen adaptation of Empyrean, as well they should for a popular female-oriented franchise. I wish that meant Hollywood feminists would leave male-driven literature such as The Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings alone, or in the library. But it’s not in their XX — or X-neutral — DNA.
Case in point, starlet Lupita Nyong’o, who ridiculously plays Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, last week mocked Homer in a YouTube interview since deleted because of the backlash. “So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?” Nyong’o taunted. “Hmm? Remember us?”
Such ignorance and insult is made possible by the steep decline in men reading fiction, precipitated by the decline in fiction written (or produced) for men and boys. Which is practically every book over the last 3,000 years, from The Iliad through The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe to the explosion of the novel in the 18th Century, now dying fast in the 21st. Those novels created immortal characters that became more real than most living people — Gulliver, Frankenstein, Captain Ahab, Scrooge, the Three Musketeers, Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, J. Gatsby, Philip Marlowe, James Bond, Don Corleone, and countless others.
One of my most precious childhood memories is of a hot DC summer day, opening a cardboard box I’d ordered for $12 from the back of a comic book. In the box lay all 24 Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I spent the whole summer in heaven, or in Africa, devouring each book, then passing it to my neighbor and still best friend, Victor. We still challenge each other with the names Tarzan called his animal friends and foes — Tantor the elephant, Numa the lion, Gimla the crocodile, Hista the snake, and I could go on.
That so many boys today will never know that experience — or later cherish memories of it — is truly lamentable. All because the liberal dragons at the publishing gate, like those in Hollywoke, deplore their masculine heteronormativity. Tarzan represents everything they detest — a toxic white male hero and leader (in anti-white Africa no less). Yet he inspired millions of men — and attracted millions of women — for over a hundred years. And that’s precisely the kind of hero I advance in my fiction — along with heroes and heroines of different races — in the hope that others will derive a fraction of the pleasure I got from reading great books.
Last week, I submitted to my publisher, Aethon Books — months late because of my eye trauma — the manuscript to my new novel, The Camelot Trail, the contracted sequel to my well-received political thriller The Washington Trail. As required in the relevance-dependent genre (READ MORE: The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller), I had to anticipate the imminent geopolitical future. The Washington Trail, for instance, required Donald Trump to be elected President, although I wrote most of it when he wasn’t even a candidate, and might have gone to prison. But The Camelot Trail really caught the wavelength of this article — the necessity of the classical hero for young men to save Western Civilization.
In it, my two Washington private-eye protagonists — plus their hot new Latina associate — must protect a British expat literary scholar and leader of the mushrooming Excalibur movement. Excalibur induces young men to resurrect Arthurian chivalry and Christianity against growing spiritual darkness and for the protection of the weaker sex. And young women to support them and the future as traditional wives and mothers. The exploding movement makes its leader the number one target of the Left, and to once great Britain.
I hope by this Christmas, there are enough readers left to enjoy the book.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
Another Nail in the Hollywood Coffin: George Washington Beats ‘Supergirl’
