60 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Undistracted reading hasn’t disappeared; it may never have existed to begin with.
BOOKS
READER, I GOOGLED IT
Amid fears about the death of books, finding new ways to bring them to life.BY DAN CHIASSON
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN DENZER
A
physical book is good for much
more than reading. In our house,
we have several large art books prop-
ping up a movie projector. A thin pa-
perback is wedged under a couch leg
in a spot where our old floors are espe-
cially uneven. One summer we pressed
wildflowers between the pages of a gi-
gantic 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 lit-
erature, bears knife marks from what
looks like chopping. Stains on its an-
cient 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 exam-
ined 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), phys-
ical 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 read-
ing physical books—a room that now
bears “the ghostly imprint of outdated
objects,” as Price puts it. Prolonged ar-
rangement 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 per-
son does on a screen. Take away the
book and the reader, and the whole de-
sign 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 func-
tion becomes décor—which, Price sug-
gests, 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 en-
croaches 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 per-
sonal 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 comput-
ers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t per-
ish the moment any of these technol-
ogies were switched on. This is in part
because, as Price argues, it never exactly
existed to begin with. Far from embody-
ing an arc of unbroken concentration,
books have always mapped their read-
ers’ agitation—not unlike the way a per-
son’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 mar-
gins of early printed books are full of