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Summary
Summary
Around 2000, people began to believe that books were on verge of extinction. Their obsolescence, in turn, was expected to doom the habits of mind that longform print had once prompted: the capacity to follow a demanding idea from start to finish, to look beyond the day's news, or even just to be alone. The "death of the book" is an anxiety that has spawned a thousand jeremiads about the dumbing down of American culture, the ever-shorter attention spans of our children, the collapse of civilized discourse.
All of these anxieties rely on the idea of a golden age, when children and adults alike sat quietly for long stretches reading edifying literature that improved our minds and souls. A booklover by temperament as much as profession, literature professor Leah Price wanted to believe that. But as a historian of the book, searching out the traces of long-dead readers through their marginalia and their unbroken spines, she began to wonder if our current digital discontents were stirring up nostalgia for a past that had never existed.
When you look at old books, what do you find? A few well-greased pagespreads limply scattered among hundreds that remained spotlessly crisp; essays stained with beer from reading aloud at the pub; novels crumpled from being hidden in a pocket. From the eighteenth-century dawn of mass literacy to the Cold-War-era triumph of the paperback, few books were read cover-to-cover, meditatively, in silence. We have been shocked - shocked!--by data from Kindle that shows that most readers start books but rarely finish them, or skip large sections in between. But it has always been so. And in fact, for much of history, "deep" reading was strongly discouraged. Doctors and clergymen warned that print could addict, distract, or corrupt--not the ideas it contained, but the very experience of running one's eyes over a page. Over the centuries, children and women especially were repeatedly warned not to spend too much time reading, lest it excite their minds and distract them from other, more edifying tasks.
Impatient with untempered book worship, Price emphasizes the continuities between past and present reading practices, and dispels the myth of the Golden Age of Print on multiple fronts. An anti-nostalgic examination of the past, present and future of reading, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books will fascinate bibliophiles and readers of all stripes.
Author Notes
Leah Price has taught English at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University, where from fall 2019 onward she will be founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative. She is the author How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and the editor of Unpacking My Library .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain), a Rutgers English professor and the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, combines a lighthearted romp through literary history with a serious intent: to argue that the rise of e-texts is not the radical change often claimed. In fact, Price argues, change is the norm in print history: the world moved from papyrus to parchment to paper, and from scrolls to codices to books, while books themselves have changed from giant medieval compilations of parchment chained in place, to early-20th-century pocketbooks printed on onionskin. Price notes that with the advent of e-texts, physical books have a newly elevated status based in nostalgia for a pre-electronic era--and are increasingly employed as therapy, their purpose displaced from the joy of reading to self-improvement. Price's factual tidbits are entertaining: for example, the first vegetarian cookbook was, ironically, bound with and printed on animal skins. However, her penchant for labored analogies--"Print is to digital as Madonna is to whore"--will strain even the most forgiving reader's patience. Nevertheless, Price provides welcome comfort that the beloved book is in good shape, regardless of the form it ultimately takes. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
Books are not dead. That's the good news in this set of bookish essays.It wasn't long ago, writes Rutgers Book Initiative founding director Price (How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, 2012, etc.), that writers such as Sven Birkerts and Robert Coover were remarking, and sometimes lamenting, the supposed decline of the book in favor of other technologiesthe computer, the e-reader, etc. In fact, reading physical books is on the rise, and in December 2018, holiday shoppers found several popular titles on back order for "that most old-fashioned of crises: a paper shortage." The widespread availability of digital devices doesn't seem to have put much of a dent in the market for physical books, though new technologies have certainly affected reading in the pastmost notably, Price archly observes, TV. What has really cut into reading time, she adds, is the in-between time we used to devote to reading books and newspapers, the time spent on bus-stop benches or commuter trains, time now so often given to navigating the many iterations of social media. Books as objects seem safe, then, though mysteries still surround them: Those data crunchers who use electronic tools to see what books people are looking at most still can't answer why we're looking at them. As Price writes, in a nice turn, "no matter how many keystrokes you track and blinks you time, others' reading remains as hard to peer into as others' hearts." The essays suggest more than form a single coherent argument about the book today, but Price's ideas that books are a communal thing and that reading them, in at least one sense, is a profoundly social act are pleasing even if libraries are now different from our childhood memories and if those books come in many forms besides between covers.Readers who enjoy books about books will find much to like here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Do you ever worry that you can't focus on reading more than a Facebook post or listicle? In her latest, Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, 2012) notes early on that the history of reading is also a history of worrying. Over the course of the book she drops many such truths. Where we now recommend reading as a panacea to escape the fear of immersive technology, once we warned that the very act of reading could be distracting, addictive, and disruptive to a healthy life. Price's premise, that there truly was no golden age of reading that we should be trying to get back to, is presented with humor and charm. Price is an avid scholar of books as objects (not just of their texts) and her wit extends to the very format of the book, which carries surprises beyond her observations and research. For fans of Susan Orlean's The Library Book (2018) and other books about books. Those still worried that technology has spoiled their attention span shouldn't be. Price gets to her point in under 200 pages.--Diana Platt Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Writing in a style that is erudite yet accessible, scholarly yet warm, Price (Rutgers Univ.) explores digital-era anxieties about the decline of reading and attendant mythologizing of books as the cure to what ails us. Price has in mind a particular form of reading (one among many functions of the book): intensive, cover-to-cover, focused, solitary absorption in long-form prose. This form of reading, Price argues, is equated to personal virtues and intellectual skills supposedly lost in the digital era. Whereas 21st-century pundits and scholars alike point to books as the solution to these losses, Price points out that books played the villain in analogous debates in the 18th and 19th centuries. Though Price builds on her analysis of the book as material object in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (CH, Sep'12, 50-0021), the current volume is both historically wide-ranging and deeply personal (Price includes a remarkable interlude about how an injury transformed her relationship to books and reading). This is a work for anyone who cares about books and reading in the 21st century. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Lesley Goodman, Albright College