Book Review: Does the Book Have a Future? | Books - Wall Street Journal

Was there ever an age of pure, immersive reading? Ernest Hemingway claimed to love ‘Ulysses,’ yet the pages in his copy were left uncut, says Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal.

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“The typical civilized man is an exhausted, spiritually hysterical man because he has no idea of what it means . . . to face calmly with his whole life a great book,” wrote Gerald Stanley Lee in “The Lost Art of Reading,” his lament of the distracted, harried state of modern life as he saw it when his essay was published—in 1902.

As Leah Price observes in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books,” “The history of reading is also a history of worrying.” Her book is a witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature, exemplified by valedictions like Sven Birkerts’s “The Gutenberg Elegies” or—forgive the echo—“The Lost Art of Reading,” by David L. Ulin. Ms. Price teaches a course on book history at Rutgers University, and her aim is to demystify the practice or reading by considering it within the context of changing eras. However different the technology, from the earliest leather-bound codex to mass-market paperbacks to e-readers, she finds that two things remain constant: Reading has always been an improvised, free-for-all activity, and there have always been cultural overseers tut-tutting about the ways that people do it wrong.

What do we notice when we “put books under a microscope rather than on a pedestal?” Ms. Price makes light of the pieties of present-day “biblioactivists” who promote the therapeutic value of books, pointing out that just over a century ago Victorian moralizers admonished that reading novels was a frivolous pastime that enervated the mind and hindered the task of self-improvement. “If literature cultivates empathy,” she asks in reference to studies claiming that reading activates compassion, “why do I leave every English department meeting wanting to strangle my colleagues?”...

Some contributors ponder a future of digitized books. What happens to pagination when a text unscrolls on a screen? Will footnotes be wholly replaced by endnotes? A virtue of “Book Parts” is that it frames these shifts as ongoing evolutionary adaptations rather than a traumatic break with timeless tradition.

If it’s age-old tradition you want, you have to go back long before Gutenberg’s movable-type press to the rhapsodes of ancient Greece and the equivalent classes of tale-tellers from around the world. “The story of humankind is the story of the human voice, telling stories,” writes Meghan Cox Gurdon in “The Enchanted Hour,” a celebration of the main place in contemporary life where the oral tradition lives on: the evening interim when parents read bedtime stories to their children.
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Source: Wall Street Journal