Blazing Reader,

In response to my "taking the fifth with Fauci" post on Wednesday, Blazing Reader Steve Van Nes (a libertarian car mechanic from Canada) sent an email, agreeing with my assessment of the Fauci clown show:

"There will be no accountability. This may just be a distraction from what is going on in the Middle East."

On a positive note, however, he added:

"The only good thing is this has brought the COVID insanity to the forefront once again. Everyone is sharing their stories, old news articles, and some funny memes on Twitter (X) and other social media platforms. It's important we remember what they did to us and try to show future generations what happened to prevent it from happening again... exactly why everyone should read Much Ado About Corona."

Sadly, getting people to read any book, no less Much Ado About Corona, is a mighty challenge in the age of endless scrolling.

Case in point, did you know that according to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.

I didn't know that either. Not until I listened to episode 506 of The Corbett Report from the week before last — conspiratorially titled "They Don't Want You To Read" — exposing not only a global effort to keep people illiterate but also some compelling arguments for turning off screens and picking up books.

Quoting from "The End of Reading is Here" in The Atlantic, James shared:

"Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding."

Now, if you're a reader looking to "return to a text" that you can "plumb it for new meaning and understanding," I can guarantee a second reading of Much Ado About Corona will be very rewarding. My novel (which, I assure you, they really don't want you to read) contains more Easter eggs than the Easter Bunny after IVF (which only become apparent once you know how the story ends).

John C.A. Manley

PS You can listen to or watch The Corbett Report's "They Don't Want You To Read" episode here. (The video version opens with an idyllic scene of James reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum under a tree on an islet in the middle of a pond surrounded by the Japanese countryside.)

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.