Every now and then it occurs to me how little I care about most literary news and gossip. I love books and I love to read but I don't care about the culture at all, probably out of simple bitterness at not being part of it. Now that I'm not involved in bookselling anymore there's even less reason to care. Everything I do in the realm of books is done in complete isolation. I might as well be reading in a wee igloo in some desolate arctic wasteland, with howling winds and the chilling sounds of distant wolves (provided I could fashion bookshelves out of ice blocks and somehow keep the books from getting too wet). I prefer not to read brand new literary works, it's a dull contrarian reflex. The older they are the better. Even giving something a year or two to simmer helps. Anything that smacks of buzz I stay away from, it doesn't matter whether it's genuine grassroots excitement or manufactured hype. Nothing can make me lose interest in a book faster than to see it discussed and gushed over in all the literary blogs and book reviews. What a dreadful person that makes me. I am controlled by childish feelings that other people grow out of on the way to leading lives of rewarding emotional richness. A few years down the road no one will remember or care that a particular book made everyone vibrate with pleasure, and the author's book tour and his interviews and so on, the splash and the publicity, the groundswell, the breathless chatter about a possible movie sale. When all that is a dim memory, that's when I'll read the book. I like to be forced to hunt down a book in used book shops because it's shockingly gone out of print, because assholes like me who actually care about literature can't be bothered to support well-regarded new works with serious intent. This is morally repugnant but far more satisfying than taking one off an enormous stack, like a warm dinner plate off one of those spring-loaded dispensers in cafeteria lines, not that any of the books I read are ever found in enormous stacks. What do I care if an author is talked about as an excellent reader or raconteur or that he makes a sparkling interview subject? What has any of that got to do with the books he writes? Writer X is reported to have a "marvelous speaking voice." Who cares? I think I'd prefer to read only writers whose crippling shyness and speech impediments prevent them from public utterances of any kind, whose genius is only revealed on the printed page. So many of these literary blogs are just thinly-disguised celebrity gossip sheets. I'm learning to stick with the ones that stay close to the books and eschew the ancillary matters. There was one I used to read but I stopped cold turkey the day it contained a smartass remark about the supposedly lamentable plastic surgery of a well-known novelist. This is nothing but crap and I am making an effort to get that sort of thing out of my life, because there are already way more books on my must-read list than I will ever have time for.