If book publishers and editors actually had to go into a store and buy all the books they say they are going to read over the holidays the slump in book sales might be over. Ask what they're going to do over Christmas and New Year's and the answer is read, read, read. And many of them will. Even for those going skiing or some such. It's as if they hadn't opened a book all year. So it's like asking a chef his day-off plans and being told he's going to a four-star restaurant.

For the professionals there are two kinds of reading. There's work reading, with an editing eye, as manuscripts come to the office in whole or part, to be read and re-read, the writer's art in progress as it goes through its creative transmutations. And there's zeal that comes with reading for fun those books that one selects carefully and puts aside for pleasure, for vacation reading. If such reading is exquisite recreation for most of us, imagine the luxury for someone who reads for a paycheck all year.

With this in mind, I thought I'd end the year by talking to some of the people I've been quoting in this column during the last 12 months to learn which books, if any, they were planning to read now that they had some time off. None of them admitted that they'd done enough reading for the year and weren't going to turn a page for a couple of weeks.

Good grief, these are serious people indeed. Just about all their celebratory reading is heavy, heavy stuff. Susan Kennedy Petersen, president of Penguin Putnam Inc., is one of the more eclectic publishers and readers. Like many in publishing, she has decided to read what multitudes of others have read and will read: David McCullough's ''John Adams'' (Simon & Schuster). ''Oh, yeah, I'll also do a lot of work-related reading, all the manuscripts my authors have sent me,'' she said. '' 'John Adams' and Anne Tyler'' -- ''Back When We Were Grownups,'' from Knopf -- ''show me how hard the competition is.''

Ms. Petersen, who also has a spiritual turn of mind, said she's going to read ''The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich'' by Alexander J. McKelway (John Knox Press, 1964), and Eckhart Tolle's ''Power of Now'' (New World Library). She said, ''It's the ultimate luxury to read books someone else publishes, all the books I can't publish because they've been done.''

Continue reading the main story

Jack Romanos, president and chief operating officer of Simon & Schuster, said: ''I am embarrassed to say that I'll finally finish 'John Adams' -- one and a half million copies into its life and I'll finally be able to finish.'' He heads the company that publishes it. Enough said. ''I've got 14 backed up,'' he said, ''and I would be kidding you if I said I could read all but one. I don't get enough time to read for pleasure. This is one of the few times I get to read what I want.''

For Janet Hill, an executive editor at Doubleday and head of its Harlem Moon imprint, the Christmas holiday means a re-read of Michael Ondaatje's first novel, ''Coming Through Slaughter'' (W. W. Norton, 1976). ''Love, passion and jazz -- it's my favorite book,'' she said of the novel, which was inspired by the life of Billy Bolden, jazz musician.

Gillian Blake, a young Scribner editor, said, ''It's a huge decision.'' She added: ''I have little time for pleasure reading. I take several books in case I start one and don't like it. I go on to the next. I always have a book on my night table that's not business, but things get so crazy I don't get to it.'' Her Christmas read? Adam Sisman's ''Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Stephen Rubin, head of Doubleday Broadway, said he was going to read ''all the books I've wanted to read, and I'll get through them all, starting this weekend.'' His list includes ''Churchill'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Roy Jenkins, and Haven Kimmel's ''Solace of Leaving Early,'' which he published but hasn't read through yet. ''I have a strict rule not to read my own books on vacation,'' Mr. Rubin said, ''but I desperately want to read the whole 'Solace.' ''

Phyllis Grann is going to go Mr. Rubin one better. She's going to read Joseph E. Persico's ''Roosevelt's Secret War'' (Random House), as well as ''Churchill,'' which will give her something to chat about with Mr. Rubin when she starts as vice chairman of Random House Inc. in two weeks. John Sterling, publisher of Henry Holt, is a subway pleasure book reader: ''Something fairly slim so it fits in my briefcase on the subway,'' he said. But big is better for the holidays, so he's finally going to take on ''The Corrections'' by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and ''April 1865: The Month That Saved America'' (HarperCollins) by Jay Winik. ''I'm constantly reading as an editor and publisher, it's almost automatic,'' he said. ''I have to try to read as a reader on vacation.'' Wendy Strothman, publisher of Houghton Mifflin, says she has no trouble reading other people's books as a civilian, so to speak, ''but it's hard to do that with our books.''

There is one publisher who reads so much that that fact will probably be included in the first paragraph of his obituary: Peter Olson, chairman and chief executive of Random House. Mr. Olson is going on a safari with his wife and two children. He's going ''to stare at animals and read,'' he said. He added:''My problem is weight restriction. Thirty-five pounds is the limit. That means I have to take as little clothing as possible to have room for the books.'' Here's what he's going to lug to Africa: ''The Boer War'' (Random House, 1979) by Thomas Pakenham; ''A Fine Balance'' by Rohinton Mistry (recently reissued in paperback by Vintage Books); ''The Emperor of Ocean Park'' by Stephen L. Carter (Knopf); as well as a collection of essays by Graham Greene and ''a novel about two Frenchmen.''

For myself, unlike Mr. Olson and his colleagues, I've read enough books this year, so I'm not going to read a thing except this newspaper until 2002.

Continue reading the main story
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/books/making-books-yes-publishers-read-for-fun.html
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
71551
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:D4BS3JYBJKXUG4M525XSZEGLQKV5FRGR
<urn:uuid:a3bdf956-6dce-451a-8e61-6e71fe0eaca5>
2017-09-24T02:21:11Z
151.101.33.164
text/html
sha1:JCJRWXVM3CXXLKLTBECR3YASH3L5TQLU
<urn:uuid:1cb718e0-b124-4588-93fe-0b6b011f7cef>
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/books/making-books-yes-publishers-read-for-fun.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:bd52729e-740b-4a4d-83fc-1c09ce7d1d59>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-99-209-250.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf