My bookstore is trying to kill me.

I like to dial down in bookstores, more so now than ever with the advent of the bookstore café-an innovation that's up there with the steam engine in terms of giant leaps for mankind, as cheapskate nerds like me sip our coffee while quaffing a bottomless cup of unbought books. 

But the display tables of my bookstore have turned to relentlessly shrill nagging.  They demand, for instance, that I take a position on Ann Coulter whom, my display tables inform me month after month, is a modestly-attractive if sluttily-dressed woman who screams (a) boldly-truthful (b) venomous right-wing rhetoric.  They're heavy-laden with screeds against our imperial government, and modestly less heavy-laden with anti-screed screeds praising our courageous and visionary administration.  There's an increasingly impressive body of why-religion-will-ruin-the-world books, which provoke a complex reaction in someone with my job.  (A: What a hateful bunch of prigs these folks all are.  B: This doesn't mean they're not right at some level.  C: Which nonetheless doesn't invalidate (A).) 

It seems to me that the bottom line of my bookstore experiences these days is that we live in IMPORTANT TIMES which demand SOBER REFLECTION and SUSTAINED OUTRAGE.  I feel sheepish for missing my youth, when a visit to the bookstore meant the latest spy thriller and gee-whiz mythologizing about the Super Bowl winning quarterback and, when I was a few years older, PG Wodehouse.  Surely reading couldn't have been invented for the likes of that.  We live in Important Times!  IMPORTANT TIMES!

I have a theory about why we want to read books-why we want to read them, not why we actually might read a given book.  We want to read books because reading books is a unique kind of fun.  There's a unique pleasure in reading something longer than this column, of connecting with another consciousness in a sustained way, and that strikes me as being a pleasure that connects to what it means to be alive.  It seems to me we've lost something when our reading-or our reflective life in any form-becomes one long series of have-to, particularly when we fill our reading time with angry books that confirm our current point of view.  Perhaps reading doesn't work well in that utilitarian universe. 

On the other hand, there's The Education of a Coach (David Halberstam on Bill Belichick) or The Beatles (longer than the Boston phone book, but great, juicy stuff for those of us who give a rip) or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (longer than The Beatles-still in the middle of this one; I'll get back to you).  Or any number of great but not directly-relevant histories out in this golden age of history-writing (I'm partial to HW Brands).  I'm told that Jess Walters's Citizen Vince or Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn are winners, if you're looking to spend your reading moments with lowlife crooks.  A friend (a woman friend, if you couldn't have guessed) is pitching the ecclesiastical romances of Susan Howatch.  I've got Philip Caputo's Acts of Faith sitting on my nightstand (it might sit there awhile-a friend gave me this magisterial novel about what's happening in the Sudan, but it looks suspiciously good for me).  I bogged down in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, but a friend is keeping me posted.  In my world, there's always Nick Hornby. 

One of my favorite questions to ask my friends is, "What are you reading?"  Now a lot of my friends don't read very much at all, and there's nothing wrong with spending time on, say, people.  But for those in my circle who do take the odd hour here or there, there are always books about God or church in some form, but that's a subject for another day.  Men, in particular, tend to abandon reading fiction (too trivial) in favor of job-related or general non-fiction.  And there's no shame in that, but today let us praise trivial books-most fiction, for instance.  Let us praise books you don't have to read, that promise you nothing more than the most primary reason we read at all-not so much to be informed as to connect, to-in the words of Shadowlands-know that we're not alone.