---
title: 'Big Readers'
date: '2003-03-12T07:30:46-05:00'
permalink: /big-readers/
tags:
    - novels
---

[Book Magazine](http://www.bookmagazine.com "Book Magazine") has released this [list](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml "Book Magazine's list") of “America’s Biggest Readers” (via [Arts & Letters Daily](http://www.aldaily.com/ "Arts & Letters Daily")). Each member of this list of folks consumes up to 20 books a week, with a diet ranging from romances through mysteries to the classics.

Something about this article completely freaks me out. Is it the sense one gets of a kind of impending textual obesity in these folks from the relentless reading-is-like-eating rhetoric (which I’ve of course reproduced above)? Is it the embarrassingly American celebration of quantity over quality? Is it that the nominees for [Biggest Reading Writer](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml#Writer "Biggest Reading Writer") and [Biggest Reader in the White House](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml#WhiteHouse "Biggest Reader in the White House") are themselves such horrifying spokespersons for the literary impulse in this country?