“What have you been reading?”

I really have to find a different question. To avoid small talk, I ask acquaintances and family members, after an absence, what they have been reading. No question seems to cause more distress—more shifting eyes, more evasive mumbling, more apologetic explanations, more confessions of professional overload and boredom. What to do about Iran would be an easier question for most people.

Not one person in a hundred keeps to a reading regimen. Every American over the age of thirty-five exercises regularly, or feels volubly guilty about not doing so. But almost no one approaches middle age with the ambition of getting around to George Eliot at last. Ask someone his favorite kind of food and he will answer as if he’d been waiting to be asked; his list will be ranked and comprehensively annotated. Ask him about his favorite genre and he won’t even bother to look puzzled; he will laugh at you.

My wife is a mystery buff. When she runs through a favorite writer—Nero Wolfe, Anne Perry—she heads to Murder by the Book, a local Houston bookstore specializing in mysteries. She interrupts the clerks—a word that, for six hundred years, meant persons of book learning—mentions Perry’s or Wolfe’s name, and they take her by the elbow and lead her to the shelves to locate kindred souls. Try that in a Borders or Barnes & Noble. The college kid with facial piercings behind the counter will not even know his own store’s inventory.

As is family tradition, my wife and I took the nieces and nephews and the aunts and uncles to the bookstore after Thanksgiving for their “holiday” gifts. Overwhelmed by topical trash and the Black Friday crowds, we grabbed a stack of paperback Goldengroves off the Buy One Get the Second 50% Off table and fled for home, where we distributed them like cards and talked about safer topics—sports, children, war.

Books are becoming a private vice in America like pornography or online poker.