Tag Archives: reading

The Unsurprising Renaissance of Reading

Last week, Timothy Egan’s column in the New York Times noted an apparently surprising outcome of the presence of e-book readers and a ‘digital monolith’ like amazon.com, which should have resulted in the loss of the culture of reading, the loss of the culture of “ideas printed on dead trees’ to that of  ’the soulless digital monolith on Lake Union, with its 164 million customers.’

But,

[T]he apocalypse already came and went, and look who’s standing. One technology, the e-book, the biggest new invention in reading since Gutenberg cranked out a Bible with movable type, changed the world — most likely for better. We have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.

Of course, it might be that the publishing industry as we know it is doomed as is the beloved independent bookstore.  But are people reading more? The answer, it seems, is yes:

[T]he Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined. One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year….those digital consumers read far more books on average — about 24 a year — than the dead-tree consumers….e-book readers also buy lots of paper books…[they] “read more books in all formats”…By 2025, e-books will be 75 percent of total books sold.

But this ‘renaissance’ should not be surprising at all.

E-books represent a mode of distribution of the written word; they offer a mixed package of conveniences and entail the loss of many of the delightful physical affordances that printed books provide. As such they were never likely to appeal to all readers uniformly and thus unlikely to comprehensively destroy the culture of reading the printed-on-paper word. Readers read books on paper, via objects they can hold in their hand, for many more reasons than simply reading. Page-turning; marking in margins with a pencil (another physical affordance of another long-used artefact); these interactions have their own value and were never likely to be completely over-ridden by the e-book. They might lose their centrality for us as our material world changes and the nature of our embedding in it does. But it will take some doing. It will not be as facile a process as e-book-phobes might imagine.

And fears that e-books and their readers would destroy the culture of reading in general were even more overblown. Why anyone would imagine that reading would be displaced by a new mode of distribution that made it more convenient has always seemed mysterious to me. In a world bursting to the seams with information, with ever more knowledge to be disseminated, processed, and articulated (and I haven’t even touched on the expanding literary world yet!) why would reading ever lose its centrality?

Expressions of fears like those directed at e-books are not so much apprehensions of technology as much as they are expressions of distrust in humanity in general, in a lack of faith in its ability to absorb, and engage with, new modes of being in the world. For far too long, fearing that a particular relationship to the world might be mediated by a new mode of technology has been  considered a fashionable expression of one’s commitment to humanistic concerns; I think instead that it covers up an alarmingly fragile assessment of the resilience of human beings. This does not mean, of course, that concerns about the lockdown of e-books by pernicious technologies like DRM are unfounded; those continue to remain urgent. But those critiques, are, I think, independent of the worry that reading books on e-book readers will impact reading negatively.

Note: I still do not own an e-book reader, and do not anticipate buying one in the near future though my ever-growing archive of reading material in PDF format is making me consider doing so. I’m open to recommendations for the best reader for PDF files; please leave these in the comments section if possible.

Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers

Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales, might lead readers to think there wasn’t any good fiction around. For as Patchett puts it, the Pulitzers are indispensable in drumming up the excitement that sends readers to bookstores, and play the same role in the literary world that the Oscars play in the world of cinema:

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

So presumably, having failed to receive a directive from the Pulitzer prize committee on which books to purchase the next time they are at Barnes and Noble or browsing on Amazon, people will read less fiction. Oh, the horror!

I’m genuinely perplexed by this. I can understand Patchett’s angst from the perspective of authors. The Pulitzers do provide a massive marketing boost to a book, and bump up sales. And thus, one easily understands her angst from the bookseller’s perspective. But as a reader, pardon my French, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Pulitzers. I read plenty of fiction, and I have not once, never, ever, ever, felt more excited or pumped up on reading about the Pulitzer award for fiction. (I watch a lot of movies too, and I remain resolutely unexcited by the announcement of the Oscars.)

I read fiction because, to quote Patchett, I realize that

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I started reading fiction as a child, and haven’t stopped yet; in my universe of reading  the Pulitzers exert no influence whatsoever. I’m not saying this as a snob; I imagine it is the same for many other readers. Patchett is genuinely confused: The Pulitzers don’t make people read more; rather they channel that reading into particular directions, towards particular locations of influence and connections in the world of writing and publishing (If you imagine the Pulitzers are free of lobbying influence, I have a bridge to sell you.) Readers read fiction for the reasons Patchett cites above; those reasons will not go away just because a Pulitzer was not awarded this year.

Patchett’s argument is an economic one; she should keep it that level, and not make the crucial mistake of imagining that somehow readers’ lives have been impoverished by the failure of the Pulitzer prize committee to award a prize. Patchett should feel free to speak as an industry spokesperson, for the machinery of publishers and authors. But she should leave readers out of it.

Remembering What One Reads

In DH Lawrence‘s The Rainbow–on which I will soon pen a few thoughts here–in Chapter 12, ‘Shame,’ Ursula wonders, overcome by tedium at studying “English, Latin, French, Mathematics and History:”

Why should one remember the things one read?

Why indeed? Ursula’s question, of course, is directed at the unquestionable tedium and seeming futility of an education that only in “odd streaks” provides her a “poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging,” but I want to try and think about it in terms of reading in general: Is it such a bad thing if one cannot remember all that one reads?

Here is an experience, familiar, I would think, to many readers. The book ends, the last page is turned, we put it on our shelves, acknowledge the pleasure it has given us, and move on. Little of what we read stays with us; a few days later, we are only able to vaguely describe the details of the book–if a novel, perhaps the particulars of the central narrative; if an analytical work, perhaps those of the argument. We feel mortified: Are these the ‘senior moments’ we were warned about? Is decrepitude, finally, here? Are we lacking in ‘reading comprehension’? The recapitulation that should be so closely associated with the pleasure that we felt while we were reading appears to have gone missing; why aren’t the book’s contours available for articulate recall?

This anxiety finds its grounding, perhaps, in a couple of dimensions. An educational culture of standardized tests might have convinced us ‘comprehension’ is the same as ‘recall’, and we might, too, have forgotten the most straightforward pleasures of reading.  In the former, we are unable to trust ourselves that being unable to remember particulars does not straightforwardly translate to ‘complete failure to comprehend central narrative/argument and internalize, store, and possibly reaccess on provision of appropriate stimulus at later points in time.’ This is all pretty gruesomely instrumental, to be honest; a ‘successful reading experience’ becomes one that we are able to ‘deploy’, ‘use’, ‘bring to bear’ on some act of practical cognition. The ‘value’ of reading then becomes measured by its ‘utility.’

So it is to the latter dimension that we should rather turn. The act of reading is pleasurable in itself; it is not a means to an end, it is an end of its own. While reading, we are–in the way that we were instructed by the  enthusiastic reading-boosters of our childhood, our parents and teachers–transported. The encounter with the book is refuge, journey and scholarship all at once. (I acknowledge that ‘scholarship’ is a rather portentous term for some, if not many, of our reading encounters!) While reading, for that period of time, we enter into dialogues and conversations with several selves–the author and ourselves, at the bare minimum–in several registers. The end of the reading of a book is not, and should not, be occasion for ‘outcomes assessment’; it might be more appropriate to mark it with farewells to a companion that is able to–for the hours that we let it–remove us from a world ‘full of care.’

Walking and Reading

We all know the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time is a rare talent. But what about walking and reading? This seems a rather more mundane ability, if the number of New Yorkers that indulge in the act of simultaneous perambulation and literary consumption is any indicator. This city’s sidewalks are broad and pedestrian-friendly, and thus, indulgent of the mindfully-distracted stroller, one that covers blocks by the dozen, all the while consuming pages by the mile. If the tourist in New York is easily detected by the upward craned neck, the resident is easily spotted by the insouciant burying of face in tome. While I am normally extremely intolerant of the pedestrian that is distracted by the smartphone–texting while walking seems to inspire a particularly over-the-top reaction from me–I am far more indulgent of the mobile reader; I think most New Yorkers are too.

There are variants, of course. Book-reading while walking is far more common than newspaper- or magazine reading, for instance. I’ve never seen schoolkids stroll down a sidewalk while cramming for exams. I have though, seen graduate students walk back to their apartments from the subway station while finishing off journal articles. And I have, many a time, caught in the middle of a page, a paragraph, or a sentence, as the subway pulls up at the station, simply stood up, book in hand, walked out, and resumed reading. Till an appropriate point for interruption suggests itself; I have never quite managed to muster up the courage required to walk all the way home from my current station; that journey involves six crossings, and I simply wouldn’t dare.

For my money, the best public and collective display of walking while reading I’ve witnessed took place in my boarding school years. Then, just before year-end exam time, the school’s main athletic field would feature dozens of blazer-and-tie-clad schoolboys, each carrying a textbook, diligently marking time and laps as they walked, face immersed in a soon-to-be-turned page, each desperately seeking to imbibe as much of its wisdom before the moment of recapitulation and examination presented itself. From a distance it looked like some ancient Benedictine ritual: monks navigating a monastery compound, each absorbed, perhaps, by some recent exegesis of the Scriptures. I took part in this little ritual too; I read histories of medieval India, Midsummer Night’s Dream, collections of short stories (Never a science or math texbook, of course; it was understood that those could not be consumed in this fashion, but rather, had to be “worked through” with paper and pen handy.)

What has remained common to my New-York-City-sidewalk- and schoolday acts of literary peripateticism is the giddiness caused by the appreciation of the recklessness of the act: here I am, head down, charging into the unknown, not deigning to see what lies ahead, consumed by the printed word. In a world where distraction is so commonplace, where we do not have time to stand and stare, but plenty to check email again and again, it almost feels subversive to pay so much attention to the printed word in the midst of all that is hectic and impatient.

The Library Noise Zone

The Internet’s latest viral video seems to be that of a young female student at Cal State-Northridge, loudly, angrily, berating her fellow students for “breathing too loudly” in the library. The video is apparently evoking much hilarity; I have not seen it myself and don’t intend to link to it. More evidence of excessively high-strung, grade-conscious, parent-oppressed, desperate-for-upward-mobility Asians, run rampant in the nation’s universities. Encoded somewhere in the hilarity that has ensued, of course, is the archetype of the “hysterical” woman, unable to “man up” and deal with what? A little heavy breathing?

I sympathize with the young woman; I suspect the “breathing too loudly” complaint was merely the tip of the iceberg. Before that, the endless chattering, the noisy headphones, the eating and drinking, and attendant slurping from coffee and smoothie cups, or the crinkly sound of bags of chips being opened, the use of library quiet corners for watching YouTube videos or updating Facebook pages, or snuggling up with one’s latest squeeze, must have driven her over the proverbial mental cliff.

I wonder if in the past, she had looked up from her textbooks, and sent an irate look or two some offenders’ way, hoping against hope they’d get the hint, and lower the volume of whichever urgent discussion they happened to be engaged in, only to be confronted with either a quizzical look or the blank look of the oblivious, or perhaps even a look that said “What? You got a problem with that?”

How peculiar, she must have wondered, that a shrine to literacy becomes the grand exhibit for a dazzling demonstration of the lack of ability to read the sign that says “Please help us in keeping our library a quiet place for study and reflection.”

Teaching Philosophy By Reading Out Loud

This semester, while teaching my two classes (Freud and Psychoanalysis; Modern Philosophy), I’ve relied at times on reading out loud my assigned texts in class. In particular, I’ve read out, often at great length, Leibniz’s Discourses on Metaphysics and The Mondadology, portions from The Critique of Pure Reason, and in the Freud class, portions of Civilization and its Discontents. I’ve followed this strategy for a variety of reasons.

First, more careful exegesis becomes possible, and little subtle shadings of meaning which could be brushed over in a high-level synoptic discussion are noticed and paid attention to (by both myself and my students). Second, students become aware that reading the text closely pays dividends; when one sentence in the text becomes the topic of an involved discussion, they become aware of how pregnant with meanings these texts can be. Third, the literary quality of the writing, (more evident in Leibniz and Freud than in Kant) becomes more visible; I often stop and flag portions of the text as having been particularly well-expressed or framed. The students become aware that these arguments can be evaluated in more than one dimension: analytical and artistic perhaps.

This method is exhausting, and that is an understatement. There is the obvious physical strain, of course, but doing this kind of close reading is also intellectually taxing. There is more to explain, more to place in context. I could not, and will not, do this for all the material that I teach. Indeed, I have only done this once before: once again, while teaching Leibniz and Kant in the same class some six years ago. (I’m not counting the various instances where I make students consult the text in class).

But most fundamentally, what this method does for the students (I think) and for me, is that it reminds us all that there simply is no substitute for close, critical engagement with material that is intellectually challenging.

Greenblatt, Shakespeare, and the “Intensity of Individuation”

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare has been sitting on my bookshelves since about 2006, when David Coady, then visiting New York for a study leave, left it behind in my care as he returned to Tasmania (I lie; David’s wife, Diana, included it in a package I was supposed to either mail them or bring with me on my next trip to Australia, and I never did so; so the book is mine now; forgive me, David and Diana). But all that is prelude.

For today, I began reading this purported biography of the Bard, one that aims to make his art comprehensible. (My reading, began, quite naturally, as it does for many New Yorkers, on the subway; in this case, on the Q train, as I headed to Manhattan for some rather mundane chores). As I began, I was struck by the following passage (in reference to Shakespeare’s reworking of sixteenth century morality plays):

Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached to not to generalized abstractions but to particular named people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth, but Prince Hal, not Everyman, but Othello.

This is a fine point, nicely put.

First, I like the thought of “the spectacle of human destiny” being “attached” to people; almost as if human beings carried around a stage, a tapestry, of human affairs, fortunes and misfortunes with them, one revelatory of particulars and generalities, capable of telling stories and histories. And each human being, therefore, able to provide a particular perspective on the “spectacle.”

Second, Greenblatt makes us aware of the balancing act that Shakespeare is able to pull off: his characters are realized, indeed, with an “unprecedented intensity of individuation”, and yet, are able to convey the generality of the human spectacle. Indeed, Shakespeare is able to draw an exquisite contrast between the “intensely individuated” character and its ability to make us sense and comprehend broader, universal “truths” about us. As the contrast grows between the highly specific, idiosyncratic, unique character, and its simultaneous familiarity, we are entranced by the artist’s genius. He has managed to introduce us to novelty and particularity, to the familiar and the unfamiliar, all at once. And perhaps more to the point, he makes us aware each person is an “eye on the world” one capable of making us see.