To respond more fully to GOB’s post:

While I fully support Mr. Allen’s tower metaphor, having experienced Laurell K. Hamilton once, I cannot find it within me to subject myself to her again. On the reading front, there can be nothing worse than opening a novel about vampires only to find dreadful sentences, inconsistent logic, endless cliches, and characters so thin that they resemble thin wafers rather than full flesh and blood. There can be nothing more horrible than picking up a book and realizing how terrible it is and throwing it across the room and realizing that you have to give into crappy emotions rather than letting the great joys and pleasures of literature subsume your very being. A great read is like great sex. You wonder if it’s possible again and you realize, holy hell, it is. And you’re just as wowed by it the next time. And the next time after that. And it reminds you just how great the reading experience is.

But a bad book is the asshole who dents your car and drives away. It’s the guy behind a telemarketing scam who calls a lonely old woman and bamboozles her out of her life savings. Sure, you’ll pick yourself up off the ground and dust yourself off and live to fight another day. But it may not be easy. It’s the bad books that often discourage those who aren’t so stepped in this books thing from giving it another shot. And just as everyone has a different notion of who an asshole is, each and every person is bound to have a different notion of what a bad book is. That’s the trouble. That’s also the excitement.

One wants to avoid the bad books whenever possible, just as one wants to avoid the assholes. But the flip side of this mission is to keep an open mind (genre-blind, personality-blind) and remain open to the many possibilities of the universe (literary or human). And jumping off the cliff into something you’ve never even experienced could very well leave you bruised. But how else will you know what’s beyond the cliff? And how else can you find recherche treasures?

But just as one must display a little common sense with life, one must display a little common sense with books — however narrowly or broadly one decides to pursue it. So my feelings on the tower is that I’m glad it’s there, but I’ll be the crazy bastard shrieking outside the window about the great jacuzzi on the literary fiction floor, inviting people to come inside. Of course, I’ll still ride the elevator, even if I could care less about where things fall on the vertical axis.

Recently, I picked up a book. I flipped through the title page, examined the copyright page and the table of contents. At this point, everything was good. I was prepared to give the book a chance.

But the first sign of trouble came when I flipped to “Page 1.” I use quotes here because I can’t be sure of its numerical status. The publisher had left off the page numbering for both Page 1 and Page 2. And what’s more, they had dared to put “Part One” on this otherwise blank page. While this notice served as a valuable guide signifying the book’s beginning, it still failed to confirm whether or not the page I was trying to examine was the first page of the book. I flipped over the leaf and saw the beginning of the first chapter. Below it, I saw the number three. I flipped backwards, counting the pages, and, yes indeed, this must be Page 1. Why then the secrecy about it? Why the failure to note the number? I was disappointed in the book already.

Things were more or less smooth for a while. I flipped to Page 4 and found there to be a number at the bottom. I flipped to Page 5, Page 6, and the numbers followed me. In case the publisher decided upon any further trickery, I kept a yellow legal pad at my desk, keeping a tally of the pages.

At Page 14, however, there was disaster. The chapter ended at Page 13. And then, to my great shock, there was a blank page with no number, where Page 14 should have been. What a tremendous waste of space! I looked at my yellow legal pad and saw that, yes indeed, I was at Page 14.

To my great fortune, Page 15 was clearly marked: both as the beginning of Chapter 2 and as “15” at the bottom.

Things continued more or less along these lines for a hundred pages. Sometimes, the blank unmarked pages were there. Sometimes, they weren’t.

But things really took a turn for the worse when I was at the end of Part One. There were two blank unmarked pages after the text of Part One ended. And then there was another page marked “Part II.” Yes, believe it or not, this author had the temerity to switch from Arabic to Roman numerals midway through the book! Furthermore, the pages were again unnumbered until I got to the first chapter of “Part II.”

I threw my yellow legal pad against the wall and begin calling friends to understand why so many pages had been abandoned by their creators. Why were some pages numbered and some pages not? Who set the priorities around here?

I started flipping through more books and noticed that other publishers did this too. I know I’ve been told by some of my pals that I have a literal mind, but who mourns for the unnumbered pages? Who considers their feelings? Who considers the waste of space? A page may be blank, but is it possible that the blankness might convey some message? If so, why not number the blank pages too?

In conclusion, I have to say I didn’t care for this book and that War and Peace and Les Miserables were better than this book. I think the main reason why those books are classics is because their authors have taken the time and care to number each page. Which is more than I can say for this book or other books. But perhaps I object to this white space because it reminds me of the quiet room that Dr. Yasir and his staff locked me into yesterday.

Nick Hornby notes that reading should be fun. He notes:

To put it crudely, I get bored, and when I get bored I tend to get tetchy. It has proved surprisingly easy to eliminate boredom from my reading life. And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books. It’s one of the reasons why we choose to do almost anything else rather than read; very few of us pick up a book after the children are in bed and the dinner has been made and the dirty dishes cleared away.

While I can get behind the idea that books can be fun, the way that Hornby has phrased his rhetoric strikes me as deficient. It’s one thing to march through a lengthy and turgid book and go out of your way to determine what an author is trying to say (even when it fails to strike a chord), but to throw a book aside simply because one is bored or one cannot find a single point of interest is counterproductive and far from quixotic. To my mind, any good reader should remain naturally curious and committed to the task at hand, which also involves reading things outside what she’s comfortable reading. The copout excuse of boredom cannot do justice to a book, nor can it effectively attune or expand a reader sensibilities. The real question a reader should ask is why a book failed to reach her, what about it succeeded or failed, and why the book was incompatible.

The problem isn’t so much that reading isn’t fun, but that Western society retains a terrible prejudice against the intellectually curious, a state of thinking that can be extremely fun. The academic world is often a humorless millieu of rigid deconstruction. A high school English teacher must subscribe to an inoffensive administrator-sanctioned reading list. Any cockeyed perspective, even a half-baked one, outside the acceptable range of responses is considered wrong or incorrect — this, despite proven results from teachers like Rafe Esquith. Moreover, the thought of thinking and entertaining in the same bite is about as daffy as a peanut butter and banana sandwich for lunch.

Hornby’s proselytizing may win him points among his slacker constituency, but why an’t both camps commingle here? Can’t we find a balance that encourages a new generation of fun-loving, energetic and intellectually rigorous readers? Or has our culture become so hopelessly “bored” that the mind stumbles into atrophy instead of curiosity?

Booksquare points to this LA Times article about LAX passengers traveling to London having to check in their laptops and shifting to reading books in the process. But the folks in Southern California are a hell of a lot luckier than those flying from SFO to London, who were forced to check in all books before the ten hour flight to Heathrow.

In fact, books are being banned at a number of airports:

• From Australia to Heathrow
• From Russia to the US (but not apparently from Russia to the UK)
• From Seattle to Great Britain*

In that last article, a traveler named Allison Yearsley remarks, “The thought of 10 hours without a book is awful.” And I have to agree. Short of a terrorist explosion (statistically improbable), I can’t think of anything much worse when flying. What a stupendous waste of time!

The folks at Heathrow have gone overboard with their security paranoia. This was, after all, a foiled plot. Banning liquids is one thing, but have they not considered that permitting books might allow passengers to remain calmer and more relaxed, thus causing less of a burden to both security and passengers? They’ve banned matches and lighters from security. What exactly are the passengers going to do? Rip out pages and fold them into paper airplanes? Wow, weapons of mass paper construction!

Further, why do Angelenos flying into Heathrow get books and those up the coastline don’t? Like any madness, there’s no consistent method here. Or perhaps those flying out of LAX are more likely to cause a scene. Or maybe it’s all designed to facilitate Paris Hilton.

Whatever the reasoning behind book banning, these new flight restrictions have transformed the act of flying into something resembling a mobile solitary confinement cell.

* — Even worse, a couple was forced to pack away their kid’s coloring books.