Dudes Who Read

A few of us remain.

First, apologies for my absence from this space last week. I was leading a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which I’ve done annually since 2012. This group consisted of students from Fuller Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program. The trip was great: excellent weather, good people, and we beat the big bug hatch and fire ban by a day.

We talked a lot about books, of course, because this was class, and the students each had to give an oral presentation and lead a discussion on one of the books from the syllabus. Which usually leads to talk of other books, etc.

The stats on reading books are not great these day. Here’s one fairly depressing graph:

And the numbers are even worse among men:

Every year, more books are published (exacerbated by the explosion of self-publishing, 4.2 million books were published last year, which is 15X more titles that in 2005,) and fewer books are read. That’s not great news for an author, and it explains why I’ve struggled to land a literary agent for my fiction.

But this isn’t a bad news post. This is a good news post.

Because I realized this week that I have a handful of guy friends with whom I talk about books regularly. Tim and I take a weekly dog walk, and conversation about what books we’re reading is inevitably part of our journey. Nate texts me book recommendations regularly and has even shipped some used books to me from Texas. And there’s Silas and Bryan and Ryan and Ryan. And I could go on. I’ve probably got a dozen dudes with whom I share book recommendations.

Many days, when I sit down at my computer at 5am and start writing, I experience a whiff of existential crisis. Why am I producing something that fewer people want each year? A product that has decreasing demand and increasing supply? Some of it is protest, because I believe that a book is able to do something that no other medium can do — not a movie or a Substack post or a short story or a sermon. A novel can tell a story with nuance and complexity over time. It can reveal the inner thoughts of a character. It can set a scene and advance a plot and confuse and confound a reader, then resolve a conflict in ways that are satisfying or hilarious or heartbreaking.

The other reason I write is because it’s one of the few things I’m good at. I’ve tweeted and podcasted and preached. I’ve shot a pilot for a TV show (password: tony) and pitched it. I’ve applied for jobs, some of which I’ve gotten, some of which I haven’t.

But from the time I sat down with a Gateway laptop computer on a folding card table in 1999 and typed the first sentence of Postmodern Youth Ministry, my first book, I felt at home in that pursuit. Alone and reliant on no one, writing for me is a welcoming place, a place of both challenge and comfort.

It’s headspinning to me that over the last decade, in addition to my final nonfiction book, I have written five-and-a-half novels. This is not to brag, trust me. Instead, I have to convince myself that I haven’t been wasting my time in some frivolous pursuit, chasing the dream of being a novelist. Every rejection by a literary agent, which come at a rate of at least three per week, is a humbling reality check. Nevertheless, I persist. And part of the reason I do is because of the aforementioned Dudes Who Read. They give me hope and a goal, and some of them have been kind enough to read my drafts and give me feedback.

So I’m going to start putting them out, to let some other dudes read them. (And maybe even some women.) The first one will be published this summer:

If you know a Dude Who Reads, give him a hug. Buy him a book. And don’t let him go extinct.