When you read a book, it is a story within the story. The French call this mise-en-abîm: the condition of being between two mirrors with an abyss of yous staring back.
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You turn the page of the fictional story while an hour of your own passes. The characters breathe, laugh and cry, and so do you. When you finish their tale, you close the book and set it aside, dreaming of their ever-after, while stepping out into yours. But you don’t leave the story as you found it. No, it’s forever changed. The evidence is there: a chocolate smudge, a tea stain, beach sand, dandelion spores, a stray hair, a note, a name, a message. The story has been splintered into a duplicate image, a reflection of you in bits between the pages.
Category Archives: Reading
A book or two
I always bring a book or two [on vacation], no matter where we’re going, but unless our plans include several hours at a beach, or we’re camping and it rains, I rarely get through so much as a magazine.
Book, I’m going to read you.
Once upon a time, I would not even consider quitting a book mid-read. Reading a book was not unlike a monogamous human relationship in that sense; it involved conscious commitment, and fidelity: Book, I’m going to read you.
Over the years, this has changed. Recently it struck me that the list of books I’ve started and not finished has grown quite formidable. I ask myself what this “means,” if it reflects some kind of moral devolution. It’s interesting how there does seem to be a kind of morality of reading, and people express their reading values quite passionately.
My Books
Wired wonders if we need a paperback sized/priced ereader to really heat up the competition. People, I don’t care. I just want to own my books. It could fold out into a fort with a sleeping bag or be the size of a gnat and serve cocaine-flavoured ice cream—makes no difference to me if I have to live with locks keeping me from doing whatever I want with my books. So I’ll keep buying them in paper, instead of renting pixels, until then.
Visual Terrain
And something else I don’t like about e-book readers is that they re-paginate the book. For me, my books in my library are my memory, and it *works* as my memory for geographical reasons. I know roughly where the book is; I remember roughly where within the book the sought-after info is; I remember what the visual terrain on the page looked like, and where on the page relative to that terrain the info sat. When print shuffles itself so readily that the info loses its “geography”. We are left with searching the document at command line, and my suspicion is that’s not the right way to harness our memory mechanisms.
Definition of “writing”
[L]anguage and the books they compose may die, but storytelling never will. Like song and dance, stories are eternal to how we humans communicate and express ourselves. People will always write because they will always have something to say. Or teach. Or discover. For a long time, this has been accomplished with bound books, with paper and ink. And for a long time, it will continue to be.
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Forget e-books—they are a question of format, not content. These devices, similar to online literary journals like this one, are simply the first primordial steps in a specialization that will change how the written word tells stories for future generations.
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In the same way that the modern art movement called into question what it meant to call something “art,” this will be an era that both challenges our static definition of “writing” and redefines the relationship between “writer” and “reader.” It will change who publishes, how they publish, and what form they publish in.
Read More Books Than Blogs
This is an ad (for a T-shirt co.), but it’s funny & apropos, right? Looks like it’s been making the rounds for a while but this is the first time I’ve seen it.
Via Bookshelf Porn
[hey, no more fugly blue photo border! thumbs up, WP.]
Beauty and Cheapness
Penguin’s graphic design played a large part in the company’s success. Unlike other publishers, whose covers emphasized the title and author of the book, Penguin emphasized the brand. The covers contained simple, clean fonts, color-coding (orange for fiction, dark blue for biography) and that cute, recognizable bird. The look helped gain headlines. The Sunday Referee declared “the production is magnificent” and novelist J. B. Priestley raved about the “perfect marvels of beauty and cheapness.”
The Visual
So often when you’re thinking of a book, you remember its cover. It’s a way of drawing people through the visual into reading.
More realistic and down-to-earth
I tend to think of blogs as more realistic and down-to-earth about their topics than their print equivalents. Litblogs reflect how people really do read, compared to that horrid New Yorker list or the best books of the year that the New York Times vomits out. Likewise, food blogs are more how people eat on a daily basis, compared to the Gourmet cookbooks that think you have endless hours stretched out ahead of, with which you can pound pastry dough into submission.
The Remainder Table 