The Newyorker
Reader, I Googled It
Amid fears about the death of books, finding new ways to bring them to life.
By Dan ChiassonAugust 26, 2019
Undistracted reading hasn’t disappeared; it may never have existed to
begin with.Illustration by Ben Denzer
Aphysical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we
have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin
paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors
are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the
pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to
flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first
person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board:
the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of
Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like
chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big
atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a
drink coaster. Twenty years ago, I had a very large bump on my wrist.
The doctor examined it and told me it was a harmless fluid
deposit—nothing to worry about. His remedy, delivered cheerfully in a
French accent, has stuck with me: “Slam it with a book.”
As Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “What We Talk About
When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic),
physical books—which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be
obsolete—show no signs of going away. Nobody would try to pop a cyst
with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone.
I am writing this on a laptop in a room designed almost entirely for
reading physical books—a room that now bears “the ghostly imprint of
outdated objects,” as Price puts it. Prolonged arrangement of the body
in relation to a book seems to require a whole range of supporting
matter—shelves, lamps, tables, “reading chairs”—not strictly necessary
for the kinds of work a person does on a screen. Take away the book
and the reader, and the whole design of the room starts to feel a
little sad, the way a nursery feels once the baby grows up. Insert,
where the reader was, a person on his device, and function becomes
décor—which, Price suggests, is what books now are for many of us. As
their “contents drift online,” books and reading environments have
been imbued “with a new glamor,” turned into symbols of rich sentience
in a world of anxious fidgeting. When Wallace Stevens, the supreme
poet of winter dusk, celebrated the “first light of evening,” it was
likely a reading lamp. The glow of a screen as darkness encroaches
seems, by comparison, eerie and malevolent.
But it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish
with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was
reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at
the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the
radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t
perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. This is
in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin
with. Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have
always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s
browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to
focus on writing a book review.
There are famous examples: the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s unbound
press copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” are mostly uncut. We can’t be sure of
what he read, but we can see what he didn’t, or couldn’t, have read in
his own copy. The margins of early printed books are full of waggish
doodles—a bagpiping monkey, a knight jousting with a snail. Marginalia
can record boredom, distraction, and mental drift, or even the refusal
to read: in my used copy of John Milton’s “Comus,” the text is covered
in elaborate calligraphic “Z”s, to denote snoring. (The classroom
doodle ought to be recognized as a special genre of illustration.)
Some scribbles in books act as a warning against reading. In grad
school, I came upon a copy of the scholar Newton Arvin’s great study
of Hawthorne in Harvard’s Lamont Library. Arvin, like Hester Prynne,
the heroine of “The Scarlet Letter,” was persecuted for perceived
sexual deviancy. He was arrested by the Massachusetts State Police and
forced to retire by Smith College, his reputation ruined. On the title
page of the book, under his name, was a reader’s inscription accusing
him of “dealing in pornography, homosexuality + intercourse with
Animals.” (This last charge was purely apocryphal.) Later, another
reader came to his defense in the margins: “So what?” The book is
still in the stacks.
Price, who has taught English at Cambridge, Harvard, and Rutgers
universities, is the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative,
a wide-ranging venture that promotes book history at universities and
libraries. She is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of
every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads,
monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter
need not be a form of nostalgia. She warns of the danger of turning
books into a “bunker,” a place to wait out the onslaught of digital
life. Print, she reminds us, was itself once a destabilizing
technology.
In Price’s radical view, a book might act something like a
switchboard, connecting readers who connect to it. Though Price’s
title riffs on the famous Raymond Carver short-story collection,
substituting “books” for “love,” the most important word is, in fact,
“talk.” Her book, and my review, and the attention you bring to both,
are examples of the very kind of “talk” across every conceivable
platform that Price finds so plentiful and so encouraging in the
digital age. What we now possess, in her mostly cheery view, are
“places and times” in which readers can “have words with one another.”
These infrastructures, as Price calls them, do more to “shape reading”
than “whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined
medium.” And these reading infrastructures are more varied and more
durable than ever before, even if people are reading on their devices.
The important thing is the “interactions through which we get our
hands on books,” as well as those that “awaken a desire for them.”
As Price notes, many old-fashioned infrastructures are enjoying an
unlikely comeback, sometimes by baiting the trap: libraries now get
people in the door by loaning lawnmowers, croquet sets, cake pans, and
other nonliterary essentials. Public libraries, which became common in
the mid-nineteenth century, “form a testing ground for hopes and fears
about civic connection,” like public pools. Also like public pools,
they call up a recent past when not every citizen was welcomed. Books
themselves were viewed by some Victorians as dangerous vehicles of
contagion. Certain libraries still have the weird antiseptic feeling
of a hospital ward. And they tend to reproduce the hierarchies of
whatever community they serve. In her poem “My God, It’s Full of
Stars,” Tracy K. Smith imagines outer space as a utopian “library in a
rural community” where the segregationist past is rejected and the
pencils are “gnawed on by the entire population.” If you’re driving
through, say, Peacham, Vermont, and want to see what the community
values, the bulletin board at the little library is the best place to
start.
And there was essentially panic across the world
Independent bookstores—which suffered under the proliferation of giant
Barnes & Noble and Borders stores in the nineties, then again with the
triumph of Amazon—are now on the rise in much of the United States.
They survive partly on popular—and lucrative—authors’ readings. These
events have the effect of making an object often prized because it is
perfectly standardized and reproducible into a unique keepsake. A
visiting author signs piles of books that then usually cannot be
returned to the publisher. The signature makes the book simultaneously
worthless and priceless; most good bookstores have signed copies on
their shelves for this reason. Inevitably, these signed copies,
possessions that can only exist in the world of objects, appear on
social media.
While many say that they seek refuge in books, they document their
escapes online, and that, in turn, feeds other readers’ appetites for
real, authentic, one-off events. And authors have learned how to put
on a social-media-ready show. I’ve noted that more and more writers
now borrow from rock stars the accoutrements of the “tour,” including
set lists, promotional posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise, which
they publicize on Twitter and Instagram and sell on their Web sites;
after reading, they pose for selfies at
