Engdahl may not be one hundred percent correct in his assessment of the U.S. but I'd say he's at a good 95 percent.

After experiencing the last eight years in which have thrown off repeated occasions to examine ourselves as a nation, who could possibly not contend that we are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the rest of the world (and certainly not just in the area of literature).

As the former owner of a successful book store, I'm hard pressed to come up with the name of any contemporary U.S. author on the scale of a Steinbeck, a Hemingway, or a Faulkner.

But, truly, it's of little consequence, anyway; this country no longer reads much of anything unless it appears on a screen.

I'm not American, and I have to say, coming from a small country in the South Pacific, Americans definitely do not have a monopoly on insularity and ignorance. You can find that in any country of the world, I bet, if you look. New Zealanders definitely display their fair share of it, that's for sure.

I don't know about people not reading - I hear that all the time (mostly from my mother actually) but I don't think it's true. I work in a university library, and it seems like people read a lot of fiction - I mean, everytime I go to get a book, it's checked out. The new Michael Chabon is practically impossible to get your hands on, and I considered myself immensely lucky to be able to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao only a few weeks after our copy arrived.

I strongly disagree with the idea that Americans seem to have had forced upon them that their culture and language aren't as good as European cultures. There are so many wonderful, mind blowingly good American writers out there - for my money, Barbara Kingsolver is about as good as they come, as are Larry McMurtry, Dennis Lehane, Robert Charles Wilson, Anne Tyler, and Jeffrey Eugenides, among others.