THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: Summer's here, and the time is right for finally polishing off that literary masterpiece you have dragged every summer from the mountains to the beaches to your backyard hammock, the books you swore you'd read but never do, the books you did read that changed your life. It's must-read TV tonight on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.
Everybody knows you're not supposed to talk about books on television -- too high-brow, too elitist. So let's go right to that bottom line this industry loves so much. Last year Americans spent more than $25 billion on books. That happens to be billions more than advertisers spent on broadcast and cable television combined.
A good chunk of those billions is spent on summer reading, the season that officially begins this week. And we're not just talking about the big best-sellers, the international thrillers, the sex and shopping tomes, the search for self-esteem set against the backdrop of the blizzard of '88. No, we're talking about those literary classics, those multi-volume masterworks you swore you would read just as soon as you found the time.
So we have here a topic that involves big money, very big money, and an issue that confronts millions of us right now. The only problem is how in heaven's name do you deal with it on television?
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(voice-over): It's easy to talk about the Fourth of July birthday party that kicked off the American summer. What could be more visually compelling than the parades, the fireworks, ball games? There are diverting pictures from a day at the beach, the games, the fun, the bodies -- OK, some of them. But what about one of summer's greatest pleasures, opening up a book? It's just not that visually interesting, is it. Hey, let's see that again through the magic of instant replay!
Well, the fact is that millions of us use the summer to catch up on a book we've always promised we'd read, maybe a recent work of social history, like "Bobos in Paradise," maybe a decades-old book by Ayn Rand. Guess this reader's revving up to take on the 1,200-page "Atlas Shrugged." Or maybe a more spiritual quest. And it's a safe bet that somewhere on beaches, by the lakes, in hammocks and lawn chairs, countless Americans are once again waging a never-ending struggle to conquer those six volumes of Marcel Proust, those unread masterworks of Balzac and Henry James. The appetite for reading goes all the way to the top. President Kennedy devoured books, even if he is remembered most for making Ian Fleming's James Bond a worldwide icon. And President Clinton rarely went on vacation without lugging along a satchel full of books. Walter Mosley's "Easy Rawlins" series was a favorite.
But high, low or middlebrow, there is a widely shared hunger for the time to finally read all those books deferred. And why? To become a better, well-rounded person, to stretch our minds beyond the petty concerns of daily life. That's why we read, isn't it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Put me on TV reading? It just goes to show if you read, it's good.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GREENFIELD: Well, in fact, the people we have on tonight have read, and they're on TV. So maybe he's right.
And now it's time, in fact, to introduce our cast of characters. Bill Geist sat at the table like a man holding four aces at the world series of poker. He never tired of seeing those words, "CBS News Correspondent," beneath his name on the screen. But tonight -- tonight he knew there would be other kudos -- journalist, humorist, author of a new book on golf, "Fore! Play." And it isn't even a dark and stormy night.
OK, in plain English, my other guests are author Adriana Trigiani, whose latest work, "Big Cherry Holler," is a sequel to her best-seller "Big Stone Gap," and Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for "The New York Times Book Review." Our other two guests may be passing her large sums of cash during the show because we all know about "The New York Times."
(LAUGHTER)
GREENFIELD: But I want to -- it's confession time. We're somehow doing this on this show a lot. What I want to know is, is there a book that you have sworn you would read during this or any summer and never have gotten through?
ADRIANA TRIGIANI, AUTHOR, "BIG CHERRY HOLLER": "Moby Dick."
GREENFIELD: "Moby Dick."
TRIGIANI: It's a boy book.
BILL GEIST, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: It's a beach book, isn't it?
TRIGIANI: Yeah. Really. Ships. Not for me.
GREENFIELD: Do you think this is a character flaw or just the nature of the book?
TRIGIANI: Well, according to my 10th-grade English teacher, it's a horrible character flaw. We're supposed to love "Moby Dick." GEIST: Yes, we are.
TRIGIANI: Supposed to be one of your classics that you're not supposed to miss out on.
GREENFIELD: What's your book that you...
JUDITH SHULEVITZ, "THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW": Well, this is mortifying, but it's also "Moby Dick." I actually did get through it when I was 35, but I -- I've been trying since I was about 18, or at least since "Zelig" came out. Do you remember that movie? A man -- Woody Allen played a man who was so embarrassed that he hadn't read "Moby Dick"...
GREENFIELD: Now...
SHULEVITZ: ... that he disappeared.
GREENFIELD: You read it.
SHULEVITZ: I...
GREENFIELD: Are you a better person for having read it?
SHULEVITZ: I'm a better person for having read it. Absolutely. I cannot tell you how, but I read it. That means I must be a better person.
TRIGIANI: Well, then, I'm going to stay a bad person because I can't get through it.
GEIST: I read the Cliff's Notes, and I think I'm just as good a person as you are.
(LAUGHTER)
(CROSSTALK)
GREENFIELD: I don't mean to tip you off, but Ahab dies.
(LAUGHTER)
(CROSSTALK)
GEIST: I think "Ulysses." I go to the library. It's -- "Ulysses" is supposed to be probably the greatest...
SHULEVITZ: James Joyce's masterwork?
GEIST: No, not that one. The "Ulysses" by the car dealer. No, "Ulysses," the real -- you know, James Joyce. It's always available in the library. The great -- the great books, the great works of art are always available. Danielle Steele you might have to line up for, get on a waiting list.
GREENFIELD: Now, I just want to see how blunt we're being. Is it that you haven't read the whole book? Are there some parts of that book you read?
GEIST: First four or five pages.
GREENFIELD: Not the last five pages.
GEIST: No.
GREENFIELD: The famous Molly Bloom confession. That's the one part I thought everybody reads.
GEIST: I know. I should read that one this time.
GREENFIELD: All right, let me -- let me see if I can push the limits of candor even further. Is there what I might describe as a guilty pleasure kind of summer reading for you, something you know you're probably going to read that you'd just as soon your 10th-grade English teacher didn't find out about?
TRIGIANI: "Having It All" by Helen Gurley Brown.
GREENFIELD: OK.
TRIGIANI: I just feel any woman that weighs 90 pounds is speaking to me on some level. You know, there -- a lot of make-up tips are in -- it's a great book.
GREENFIELD: OK.
SHULEVITZ: I'm with Adriana. "Cosmopolitan," "Lucky" magazine, a magazine that has just dispensed with copy altogether and just has pictures of clothes. I love...
(CROSSTALK)
TRIGIANI: ... and where you can buy them.
SHULEVITZ: And where you can buy them on the Web.
TRIGIANI: Amazing.
GREENFIELD: Geist, this is an impressive amount of honesty we're dealing with here.
GEIST: It is. Well, I will be just as honest. I scour the best-seller lists for the latest book by a pro wrestler that's on there. And right now, Mick Foley, who used to be the commissioner of the World Wrestling Federation, has a best-seller. There's always a best-seller by a pro wrestler on...
TRIGIANI: There's a lot of Chyna in the airports.
GEIST: ... "Time Times" best-seller list. Yeah. Chyna's big. Maybe I should read Chyna.
TRIGIANI: Chyna. GREENFIELD: Well, I'll tell you what -- I mean, I cannot -- it must -- it may be what I do for another part of my living. Any political novel, no matter how bad, I will read -- "The President's Wife Is a Robot," "The Martians Have Taken Over the Transportation Department"...
GEIST: So that this information is just as good as...
GREENFIELD: It's just -- no, because -- and you know they're bad. You can pick them up, and the book is screaming at you "This book was written with boxing gloves on." I'll read it.
Now, look, this has -- got to admit, this is a pretty impressive level of honesty. So we're going to press on after this break and ask a somewhat more serious question, which is what books have the power to actually change lives, and what two of America's greatest minds thought about books. We're talking, of course, about Dr. Seuss and Groucho Marx. Really. It's coming up.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP - "Being There")
PETER SELLARS: I can't read.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course you can't! No one has the time. We watch television.
SELLARS: I like to watch TV.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh -- oh, sure you do. No one reads!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREENFIELD: From the classic "Being There," a classic book and movie.
We are back with chapter two of our serial on summer reading. Our dramatis personae -- guests, in plain English -- CBS correspondent Bill Geist, "New York Times Book Review" columnist Judith Shulevitz and author Adriana Trigiani.
Let's broaden this out a little bit, Judith, in terms of what people beside the ones at this table are reading. There are a couple of books about the Founding Fathers now on the best-seller lists -- McCullough's -- he was a guest here last night -- Joseph Ellis's. Why do you think? Why are people so interested in that?
SHULEVITZ: Well, I think McCullough's book is explained by the fact that Adams is an incredibly appealing character. He's just -- he's candid to a fault. He's human. He had temper tantrums. He could never conduct himself like a Founding Father. And McCullough really draws that out.
GREENFIELD: But you don't know that before you buy the book, right? SHULEVITZ: No, but you know, there's always enough buzz about a book that you sort of get a sense -- there's -- for example, this week there's, I think, articles in every major newsweekly about how Adams is up and Jefferson is down.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENFIELD: OK. Is there anything else to this, do you think, that -- Joseph Ellis's book is on the best-seller list. I mean, I'm...
GEIST: I don't know. I mean, I think that we're -- you know, there's a whole thing about searching for men with real ideals and people with real ideals and people who were brave and put their lives on the line for their ideas and stuff. I mean, I think that's a very appealing thing. And it happens to be true, so...
TRIGIANI: It also helps that it's brilliantly written.
GEIST: Yeah.
TRIGIANI: And I think he had so many fans with "Truman," and his books, even though they're historical and they're non-fiction, read like novels. He laces those letters in beautifully.
GEIST: Yeah, because...
TRIGIANI: He gives you a...
GEIST: ... Adams has been there for centuries, just lying there...
TRIGIANI: Right, and nobody...
GEIST: ... and nobody bothered to...
(CROSSTALK)
GREENFIELD: But speaking of adventures, the books about disasters seem to be flying out of the shelves...
(CROSSTALK)
GEIST: ... for a good disaster. I've been, you know...
GREENFIELD: "Perfect Storm"...
GEIST: ... going out in small boats during hurricanes and stuff, but nothing's happened to me yet.
GREENFIELD: Well, a book about the disaster on Everest. I mean, it does seem that -- that -- and I don't know whether that's as simple as just most people don't get to have those adventures and...
TRIGIANI: Well, you know, wherever there's an opportunity for cannibalism. SHULEVITZ: Good point!
TRIGIANI: You know what? That's going to sell.
GREENFIELD: That's what my political book needs.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENFIELD: That's what a -- you got to have these guys eating each other.
TRIGIANI: Eating crow!
GEIST: They almost do, don't they, Jeff? I mean, honestly, in Washington, it gets close to that.
GREENFIELD: You're right. There's another side to what people read, and I -- I do think this is -- is a real indication of a -- of a cultural gap. If you ask people in New York who read "The Times Book Review" religiously, "What's a best-seller," they'll you the list. "Prayer of Jabez" -- six million copies sold, the book that's -- according to the author, provides spiritual sustenance. Some people have said he hasn't, that it's about earthly sustenance.
TRIGIANI: Praying for a new car.
SHULEVITZ: Prosperity theology.
TRIGIANI: Yes.
GREENFIELD: The left-behind books, the books that take place at an Earth after the Rapture has taken the righteous to heaven, Christian thrillers -- 20 million books sold. Have any of you read any of that?
SHULEVITZ: I've read "Prayer of Jabez,' which I think is actually unusually good for self-help book. It's essentially a sermon. It's -- it's the published Sunday sermon, which was the most popular genre of the 19th century. He's returned to that, and that's what he's written. And it has self-help elements to it. There are four steps to giving yourself over to God and getting really rich. But -- but it has the form of a sermon, and that's sort of uplifting.
GREENFIELD: But what is it -- it does seem to me it tells us something that very few people who -- I would argue, who consider themselves informed about books -- if you said, "Tell me the hottest book around," they wouldn't know about the left-behind books, would they?
GEIST: No.
GREENFIELD: What do you think?
TRIGIANI: There's a lot of Christians, and they have Christian bookstores.
SHULEVITZ: Right.
GEIST: Yeah.
TRIGIANI: And that's how these things catch on. They're not, you know, at the chains or the independents so much until they catch on in those smaller stores. And then forget it!
GEIST: But she said four steps to getting a good car and lots of money -- I mean...
TRIGIANI: Well...
GREENFIELD: He says not, by the way.
GEIST: Isn't that kind of -- yeah.
GREENFIELD: He's very -- very adamant that there is one sermon about wealth, but it's really more about a richer life than just that. But it does seem to me that there is -- I mean, I'm making the point, I guess, with some forcefulness because I believe it, that there is a big gap between the literary community and the broader book-buying public.
TRIGIANI: Oh, there is!
GEIST: Definitely.
SHULEVITZ: Oh, yeah.
GEIST: Definitely.
TRIGIANI: There is.
SHULEVITZ: Ten percent of -- almost 10 percent of all books published have a religious angle. There's a huge market out there. And it's only growing. I mean, all the studies show that people are returning to religion, and I think the market's only going to grow. And they...
GEIST: We're doing a piece on fitness at CBS, and they're talking about even in fitness -- you know, it's yoga. It's holistic. It's spiritual. It's -- they want more than -- you know, so there is -- I think there is a longing for that.
GREENFIELD: The first --
SHULEVITZ: Dieting, marriage counseling, everything can have a Christian angle.
GEIST: Right.
GREENFIELD: The first cousin to this question, really, I think has to do about -- and I don't -- I wish there were a nicer word, but there isn't -- about a kind of snobbism. I sometimes think that if a writer is successful enough, sells enough copies, it automatically makes it impossible for this writer to win the respect of the literary community.
TRIGIANI: That's crazy! This is America. You want to sell your book. You want people to read your story. But there is snobbism about it. I mean, I -- but I think even the biggest intellectuals want to be a best-seller.
GREENFIELD: Oh, I don't doubt that.
TRIGIANI: Don't you think?
(CROSSTALK)
GEIST: But you have to say that -- I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead.
SHULEVITZ: I was just going to say I do think that when you have someone who's -- who's -- who's sort of a target, a commercial success, the reviewers kind of take aim. I mean, I think a reviewer wants to strut their stuff, and they can do it when somebody's big. And they can't do it -- if you have a first novel, for example, that's worthy but small, you're just not going to want to crush them as a reviewer. But if it's...
TRIGIANI: Really?
SHULEVITZ: ... if it's worthy but -- if it's less worthy but really big, they will.
GEIST: But this is America. And I mean, the most popular movies, the most popular television shows -- there's a lot of bad stuff out there.
TRIGIANI: Well, sure.
GREENFIELD: But that leaves me -- we've got enough time in this segment, just, to raise the question -- is there someone any of you regard, somebody humongously successful, who you also say, "You know, that's a darn good writer"?
SHULEVITZ: Line by line, Stephen King.
GREENFIELD: Yeah, that's...
GEIST: Yeah. Somebody whose writing's great.
TRIGIANI: I would agree with that.
GREENFIELD: Well...
TRIGIANI: John Grisham, too -- "Painted House." Did you read "Painted House"?
SHULEVITZ: I'm not -- I'm not as big a fan of Grisham as I am of King.
GREENFIELD: But I think that -- I think that that's the perfect example. Stephen King knows how to plot. He knows how to develop characters. He knows, certainly, Lord knows -- knows how to make your skin crawl. And he sells millions of copies. And I don't know, maybe Dickens went through this because he was a best-selling writer, that it's going to take 50 or 100 years for people to say, "You know, he was not only a best-selling author, he was one heck of a writer."
SHULEVITZ: He was dismissed as a Victorian sentimentalist for 50 years.
GREENFIELD: So now we move to the most cosmic of questions after this break. When we come back -- this is why we want to give our guests time to really ruminate -- can the written word change your life?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GREENFIELD: We are back, and we're talking about books with my guests, reading left to right, humorist and author Bill Geist, "New York Times Book Review" columnist Judith Shulevitz and "Big Cherry Holler" author Adriana Trigiani.
And before we go on, in 20 seconds or so, what's -- what -- where do you set your books? What are they about?
TRIGIANI: They take place in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in a small coal-mining town in southwest Virginia.
GREENFIELD: And...
TRIGIANI: And they're about the life of Ave Maria Mulligan McChesney. She is an Italian transplant who -- she's a foreigner, and it's the story of her life beginning at 35, when she's a spinster.
GREENFIELD: Ah.
TRIGIANI: And it's what happens to her over the course of two books, and then a third one's coming next year.
GREENFIELD: Well, OK. Now, that book may change somebody -- people's lives who read it. I want to ask which books you have read that did.
GEIST: Absolutely. I mean, introducing somebody to a different way of life will. I -- I always talk about one -- Tom Wolfe's writing back in the last '60s. I was in journalism school. I was debating about whether -- I thought you had to go cover City Hall and sewer bond referendas and stuff. And he wrote about Junior Johnson, the stock car king down in North Carolina. And I realized that -- not -- not because I wanted to put exclamation marks after every sentence, but just the subjects that he chose, the topics that he chose. I realized there was a whole new area out there of interest in journalism.
GREENFIELD: Judith?
SHULEVITZ: Henry James, I'd have to say. I read Henry James for the first time when I was a freshman in college, and what I didn't understand before I read him is that you could actually write about moods, the way he did, that I had an inner life, that other people had an inner life and that you could actually turn it into prose and then turn it into novels and sell it, in fact.
I just never had any idea before I read that, so he gave me an inner life, and that changed it.
GREENFIELD: And for you?
TRIGIANI: Ben Hecht, who wrote the life story of Charles MacArthur, his best friend. It's just one of...
GREENFIELD: Ben Hecht was a...
TRIGIANI: ... the most beautiful...
GREENFIELD: ... was the guy who co-authored "The Front Page"...
TRIGIANI: Right.
GREENFIELD: ... with McArthur.
TRIGIANI: With MacArthur.
GREENFIELD: He was the symbol of free-wheeling, hard-drinking journalism.
TRIGIANI: And that book, which came out in 1959, has completely -- he predicted everything about Hollywood and the movies and television. It's all there. So I like books like that, that I kind of go back and it turns out that these writers had their finger on the pulse and the future.
GREENFIELD: My own candidate was "The Southpaw," a book by Mark Harris, the first in a series about a pitcher for the New York Mammoths named Henry Wiggins. I was 9, 10. And this was a grown-up book about my passion, and it was a kind of escort into the world of grown-up books because it was about something that I loved. I also want to say, in the spirit of candor, that I think a lot of people's first experience with adult books was thumbing through them looking for the one page or two about sex.
GEIST: Correct.
GREENFIELD: Of the Amboy Dukes, I think a lot of people in my generation read...
GEIST: I just went with medical journals. It was a lot easier. It was indexed and all that.
TRIGIANI: Well, my aunt had "Coffee, Tea or Me?"
SHULEVITZ: "The Naked Ape" for me.
GREENFIELD: OK, so we're all guilty -- not guilty. We're all -- we share this. I also want to talk more broadly about the writers that you would tell a friend or somebody who said to you, "Tell me somebody who you go back to," because there's nothing more fun than stumbling on a writer and realizing you've got a whole shelf of books by this writer that you now can get through, that you may never have heard of. Who's -- who would you tell...
TRIGIANI: Well, when you're feeling murky and you're a woman, reread "Jane Eyre" because she sticks to her principles against all odds. And I reread it every summer, and I -- I just love what she has to say about sticking to your guns and doing what you believe in, no matter what anyone else thinks. And then I would also have to say "Walden" because you can go through "Walden" and read it anew every time. And Thoreau has this masterful way of giving you the rules for living that simplify your life and focus you.
GREENFIELD: And it's not on any coffee mugs or calendars, is it.
TRIGIANI: No. You know, I'm horrified because there's a financial institution -- listen, they do commercials. We can't knock that. But they -- they clipped his quote badly. The quote is -- I'll take a second -- "If one advances confidently" -- correct quote is, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined for himself, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours." So his point was "Do what you do every day, focus, and you'll -- you'll reach your dream." But the financial institution says just sort of, like, you know, clip the first part, so you just cash in big now today.
GREENFIELD: We are down to literally our last minute. Who's the writer you'd like to talk -- let people know about?
SHULEVITZ: The writer I go back to again and again is Philip Roth. His -- his voice just sounds like home to me. He's nothing like me! I mean, I'm -- I'm not a randy Jewish male. I'm, you know, a possibly randy Jewish female. But he's -- he just -- his experiences are totally different from mine, and yet somehow his voice sounds -- seems to come from the inside, in a way.
GREENFIELD: Bill?
GEIST: I like Ben Hecht. I like "The Front Page," "Our Man in Havana," Graham Greene. Dreiser I like. I do like Henry James. People -- most of my friends look at me and say, "You read Henry James for fun?" And yeah, I do.
GREENFIELD: My candidates -- Elinor Lipman, a wonderfully humorous writer...
TRIGIANI: Great!
GREENFIELD: ... about the tribulations of women. Dawn Powell, who Gore Vidal rediscovered, who Dorothy Parker would have been if she'd -- if she'd written novels instead of hanging around the Algonquin club. And the late Ross Thomas, this wonderful writer of literate thrillers and mysteries. He's written 25 books. I've given you the next five summers of your life if you like him. We've also come to the end of our tale, so it is time to bid farewell as the sun sets in the west, to our guests, CBS correspondent, humorist Bill Geist, the "Close Reader" columnist Judith Shulevitz of "The New York Times Book Review," Adriana Trigiani, author of "Big Cherry Holler."
And when we come back, an epilogue, the joy of books Cliff Notes version.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GREENFIELD: And another thing. When you talk about books, there is a strong temptation to quote impressive-sounding sources. You know, Aeschylus, Carlisle, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Pliny my brother-in-law who couldn't hold a job if his life depended on it. But actually, there are other more familiar counsels to cite. Mark Twain, for instance, knew about the struggle to get through a certified great book. A classic, he said, is a book everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
It was Dr. Seuss who said the more that you read, the more things you know, the more things you know, the more places you'll go. And it was Groucho Marx who said, "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is very hard to read."
Of course, it was also Groucho who said, "I must say, I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book."
I'm Jeff Greenfield. If you headed to the library right now, you'll catch up with all the news that we'll be reviewing tomorrow. But if you do, you will miss Sports Tonight, which is next.
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