How Reading Changed My Life (7 page)

Ms. Ellis gave Buster on the computer a fair shake, but she found the experience ultimately unsatisfactory. She concluded that the process of scrolling down, reading in a linear fashion, on a machine she associates with haste, were all antithetical to reading for pleasure. “The screen,” she says, “turned me into a reluctant reader.” When she went to the library and took out an earlier bound Buster book, her reluctance disappeared. “I experienced that feeling of surrender, of putting myself in someone’s hands, which is one of the great pleasures of fiction,” she wrote. And she reclaimed the experience of a book, pure and simple: “the soft scrape of my fingers against the pages, the glissando sound of flipping back to a previous chapter.”
The scrolling of the screen had not been the equivalent of turning the pages. A laptop is portable, but not companionable.

Ms. Ellis believed her experiment raised many questions about the future of reading in the face of the ascendancy of computers, questions that will be raised over and over again in the years to come. But, reading her words, I found more questions answered than asked, and one essential one settled to my satisfaction. At the time that technocrats had predicted the imminent death of the book as we knew it, all of us in the world of print were in a kind of frenzy about how new technology would change our old businesses. In the five years between my first job as a copy girl and my hiring at
The New York Times
as a reporter, big papers had begun to retire their typewriters and bring in computer systems on which reporters would produce the day’s copy and editors edit it. It was a modest revolution, given the advances still to come, but a revolution not without pain; one of the
Times’
s most venerable reporters insisted he was too old to learn new tricks, and his copy had to be transcribed into the computer from the copy paper he continued to use in his old manual typewriter.

But the real revolution was said to be coming in the product itself. Panel after panel was held at journalism conventions about whether newspapers would be replaced by the downloading of the day’s news onto
a computer screen. It seemed only sensible to those whose correspondence had become characters sent by modem from one computer to another instead of a file of business letters, inevitable that the collection of folded newsprint that landed on the doormat with a
thwap
before daybreak each morning could simply be replaced by a virtual newspaper in a computer in the kitchen, coffee cup beside the keyboard.

Perhaps that may someday come to pass, in one form or another; perhaps someday it will seem quaint that anyone ever doubted that the printed book between hard or soft covers was in its twilight at the end of the twentieth century. But the decade after the initial panic over the demise of printing upon paper seemed to foreshadow a very different end. News indeed appeared on computers; so did magazines, some created expressly for on-line users. There were even books like the Buster book that Dutton put on the Internet rather than risk commercial failure. But none of them convincingly supplanted the more conventional product. Both those in the business of books and those in the business of computer technology realized something that we readers apprehended most deeply in our hearts: that people are attached, not only to what is inside books, but to the object itself, the old familiar form that first took shape four centuries ago. A laptop computer is a wondrous thing; it is inconceivable to me now that I ever did without
one, particularly in writing and revision. (There are still, of course, those novelists who like to speak fervently of writing by hand in special lined journals, or using the old Royal typewriter they were given when they went away to Choate forty years before. Not me.) But a computer is no substitute for a book. No one wants to take a computer to bed at the end of a long day, to read a chapter or two before dropping off to sleep. No one wants to take one out of a purse on the New York City subway to pass the time between Ninety-sixth Street and the World Trade Center. No one wants to pass
Heidi
on disk down to their daughter on the occasion of her eighth birthday, or annotate William Carlos Williams on-screen. At least, no one wants to do it
yet
, even those who are much farther along the cybercurve than I am. The dis-ease Ms. Ellis felt reading a book on the computer, which she described so eloquently in her
Horn Book
article, is what so many of the rest of us feel, and why the book continues to prosper. Ms. Ellis wonders if this is generational, if she finds reading a screen less satisfactory than do children born to its blandishments. But I have three of those children, and while they play games, trade mail, and do plenty of research on their computers, they do most of their reading in plain old ordinary books, some that belonged to me years ago. They seem to like it that way. My youngest grew up with a copy of
Arthur’s Teacher Trouble
on
CD-ROM, an interactive version of the picture book that allowed her to use her mouse to make desks open and birds fly. But she never gave up reading the version on paper. “I like the real book,” she said.

And a real book, not a virtual version, is more often than not what’s wanted. After all, the publisher of Dutton Children’s Books did not decide to publish
The End of the Rainbow
on-line because children were clamoring to read it on the computer. His reasons were financial, not philosophical; he simply did not believe he could afford the loss that the book would incur in conventional publication. The prophets of doom and gloom and the virtual library may use this to generalize about a future in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of wonderful books are never published at all. But the fact is that publishing in all its incarnations—small presses, large presses, vanity presses, university presses—produces many more new titles today than it did fifty or a hundred years ago. More than 350,000 new books were added to the Library of Congress in 1995 alone; that institution, founded with funding of $5000 two centuries ago, now has 200 times the number of items once found in the legendary library in Alexandria.

And if some new books only manage to make their way onto the Internet, isn’t that better than losing them entirely? New technology offered the publisher of Dutton Children’s Books, Christopher
Franceschelli, some useful middle ground between taking a substantial financial loss and not offering the book to readers at all. He wrote eloquently in a letter to
The Horn Book
, “We live in an era of transition perhaps not all that dissimilar to that of five hundred years ago. Then an entire culture had to wrestle with the meaning of the Western re-invention of movable type. Even then there were those who bemoaned the loss of texture, when the individually crafted, individually illuminated manuscript, with rubricated initials and tooled leather bindings, gave way to the radically simple black and white pages mechanically produced by Gutenberg and his descendants. Indeed there are those who would argue that the entire Protestant movement was only possible once the Book had lost its totemic value as literal manifestation of the divine Word to reappear as the book—cheap, portable, with a mutable text accessible to (and interpretable by) one and all.”

And in his history of reading, Albert Manguel concludes, “It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.” Consider, for instance, the thousands of books sold every day on-line. In at least one way, those computer services that were said to spell
finis
to book buying in America have instead
succeeded in making it easier for the technologically adept.

Katherine Paterson, in her library speech, took the long view, too, describing her despair at trying to find information on an on-line service and turning to an old encyclopedia and finding it there instead, but noting, too, “I think it well behooves us to realize that we are not the first generation to fear the changes that seem to engulf us. Plato, lest we forget, argued in the
Dialogues
that if people learned to read and write, poetry would disappear, for it was only in the oral tradition that poetry could be preserved properly.”

Well, Plato was wrong. And so, I believe, are those people predicting the demise of the book, particularly its death by microchip. The discussions surrounding the issue always remind me of the discussions from my childhood about the gastronomic leap forward occasioned by the development of astronaut food. Soon, we heard, we would be able to eat an entire Sunday dinner in the form of a pill. Soon a Creamsicle could be carried around in your pocket, run under the hose, and reconstituted on a warm day, almost as good as new.

It’s thirty years since man first walked on the moon, and when people sit down to a big old-fashioned supper it is still a plate of roast beef and
mashed potatoes, not a capsule and a glass of water. When they buy a Creamsicle, it’s three-dimensional, wet and cold and wonderful. That’s because people like the thing itself. They don’t eat mashed potatoes with gravy because they just need to be nourished, but because mashed potatoes and gravy are wonderful in so many ways: the heat, the texture, the silky slide of the gravy over your tongue. And that is the way it is with books. It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm. We like the thing itself.

It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so. It is possible that it has fallen upon hard times, but finding the evidence to prove this is more challenging than many people may think. It is true that there are almost no serializations of books in magazines anymore, a form of book that once made novels accessible for millions of readers who could not afford hardcovers. It is true that department stores no longer sell books, and that many of what pass for bookstores seem closer to gift shops, with far too many datebooks and trinkets. It’s a little terrifying, the fact that in many of the mall stores there is an entire long wall classified as Fiction and a small narrow section to one side of it called Literature. That second, smaller, section is reserved largely for dead people, dead people who represent much of
the best the world of words has had to offer over its long span.

But the ultimate truth is that they aren’t dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heath-cliff wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

I still remember sitting in the fading afternoon one day in a rambling old house in the country speaking to the elderly matriarch of one of America’s great publishing families, a woman known for her interest in all things political, social, intellectual. Near the end of our conversation she squared her shoulders, looked sharply into some middle distance behind me, and said, as though to herself, “I can’t read any longer.” The words were sad and sonorous as a church bell, and I felt that she had pronounced a sort of epitaph
upon herself, and I felt that she felt it too: I can’t read any longer.

Yet in her sorrow there was joy, the remembered joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others. Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

R
EADING LISTS ARE
arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I. My most satisfying secondhand experiences as a reader have come through recommending books, especially to my children. And I will never forget the summer reading lists I created for my sister when she lived with us during college vacations. One day she came in with a worn paperback copy of
Pride and Prejudice
and said peevishly, “Just tell me now if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not finishing the book.” How pleased Jane Austen would have been. How pleased I was.