1. Fiction is alive and well. All you have to do is walk into the library or a Borders and see the bussle. Fiction’s medium of delivery, however, has altered with the times, but this isn’t a bad thing. Audiobooks keep me sane during rush hour and have a few of my friends who never liked “reading” engrossed as they listen to the narrator dish the story.

2. Fiction’s getting sized up by non-fiction. The “For Dummies,” “KISS” and “Idiot’s Guide” series are on fire. Customers flock to books on entrepreneurship, web design, home decorating, dieting, golfing, antique collecting, and you name it. These books have more pictures and fact boxes than every before, and scream user-friendliness, attracting people who may never have cracked open a novel.

3. Fiction is not dead, but often dormant. As for those people who’ve never cracked open a novel, I’m afraid that list may be growing for our youth. Just the other week, a cousin of mine who’s an art teacher did a unit on fairy tale art. To launch the unit, she gathered her group of 9th grade nightmares for a reading of “Rumpelstiltzken.” To her surprise, most of the kids had never heard of common fairy tales like this. The happy ending: Those rowdy kids had her undivided attention for the whole reading, soaking up the literature like dry sponges and begging her to read them another story tomorrow. Remember these are 9th graders, not 4th graders.

So the fiction lover’s seed of interest is present in everybody– something (like an audiobook) or someone (like a teacher) has just gotta tap it.

But I do wish audiobooks weren’t (mostly) abridged.

I’m still irked that the Count of Monte Cristo and Lorna Doone I was assigned as homework in seventh grade were trimmed-down versions.

I just got off a plane, flying cross country. These new big boys have videos on the back of each uncomfortable chair. You can watch HGTV, ESPN 1-50, TNT, HBO, or play games, or pay $3.95 for a movie that was in theaters in June. However, when I went to the bathroom, I saw on each lap (that didn’t hold a laptop): a book. I saw: Water for Elephants, Harry Potter, Pride and Prejudice, and several obvious fantasy titles I’d never heard of, but the jackets were sexy. So were some of the readers. What does this mean? Not much. But I do believe that writing still competes powerfully with the seductive moving images that talk. Words do something else. Picture makers should have the anxiety (and they do, believe me). What will they do when the power goes off? Proust still works by candlelight.

Oh, and by the way, television is, at this moment, undergoing a historic aesthetic renaissance. By this passage this observation is fact. The Sopranos, The Shield, Six Feet Under, The Riches (why so many “The”s?) I like Dexter a lot. This week’s New Yorker magazine (10/22/07) has a wonderful piece about The Wire (another damned THE). Shelby Foote and Walker Percy use to be obsessed with The Guiding Light, a soap opera. The great Garcia Marquez has written for telenovelas. It’s good stuff. It’s a powerful form. But forms of artistic expression don’t necessarily have to battle for eye-time. They can make love. We can all get along. In the words of that great American philosopher, Martha Stewart: It’s a good thing.

Consider: 1941: In movie theaters, Citizen Kane. It bombed. Dumbo did better. So did The Maltese Falcon. In bookstores: Mildred Pierce; The Screwtape Letters; Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written in English; Eudora Welty’s Curtain of Green. Ann Tyler was born that year.

Relax.

Seriously, I don’t think fiction is dead. We humans have been making up and passing along stories since we squatted around the fires in front of our caves. It’s how we articulate and solve our dilemmas, how we gain insight into our fellow humans, how we see ourselves dancing our dance and come to understand that we’re all the same in the midst of our great individuality. Fiction is the vehicle that carries a thousand variations of the same human drama – entertaining, teaching, and healing us all at the same time.

It will never die. The form may change, but who cares? That’s just technology. We don’t draw our stories on cave walls any more or write them out in longhand. We don’t even use typewriters any longer. As long as the stories keep being created and told – that’s what matters, and my money is on it still being done when the last human turns out the light.

I think audio books have given us reading lovers another venue to read (or listen in this case). We can read “I Killed Hemingway” — which I’m reading now, buy the evening and listen to “Snowflower and the Secret Fan” by day while in your car.

I doubt fiction will die because we all want and need the escape. We need to live vicariously in someone elses shoes. We strive to be as good as some protagonists and even as evil as others — at least for a moment or two of our day.

What I can’t see is the reading of books online as ever becoming popular. It is too damn hard on the eyes and if I’m going to print it out, then I might as well go buy the darn book at Borders.

One way to know just how popular fiction remains is iTunes. Now you can download your new favorite book to listen to on your iPod. If Apple says fiction is thriving, then shouldn’t we believe as well?

Lastly, if what I witness this morning doesn’t convince you “naysayers” out there, then nothing will. It is book fair week at school (I have 3 children) and this morning was Donuts for Dads. In 20 minutes we sold over $5,000 worth of books. And, I might add, the Hannah Montana and High School Musical books were in the minority. Authors such as Gary Paulson, Madeleine L’Engle, Lois Lowry, Phyllis Naylor, & Wilson Rawls were flying off the shelves along with a whole host of Newberry winners. It was wonderful see! A whole generation of readers coming up in the ranks, dissing the junky books in favor of good writing!!!!

On that note…I look forward to finishing I Killed Hemingway.

Check out mine, for a sample, if you like: http://www.shelfari.com/mohanalakshmi/shelf