Skip to content

Month: April 2021

Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.
Published on

Leah's Price's 2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is informative and witty. It resonates differently in the pandemic's later stages than when published two years ago. Since March 2020, immersion in a world made of words (whether printed or digital) has taken on new life, sometimes sharply (Kendi's How To Be An Anti-Racist), sympathetically (Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half) and sometimes purely escapist (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires).

Not only does Price quash numerous assumptions about books, readers, libraries, and futurists, she unearths the work of many editors, designers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers who mediate the business of books between author and reader. Their invisible work is usually missed only in its absence: just try reading a error-filled, typo-rich self-published e-book on Amazon to get the point. Full credit to print book interior designer Jeff Williams, cover photographer Laura Hennessey and designer Chin-Yee Lee, research assistant Maia Silber. Since the author's acknowledgements are in alphabetical order, I am not sure which person is her editor at Basic Books/Hachette.

Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects. Price has taught book history and English at Harvard and Rutgers. She has a sharp eye for the telling detail as well as the point of academic theories and critical turns.

Price overturns many assumptions both by readers and those who claim reading is becoming a non-issue. Why do both fetishize cover-to-cover reading of literary classics when that has always been a small minority of all book uses? She looks at what books can tell us about their users: which pages are thumbed, marked, dog-eared, which apparently untouched. The myth of the ideal book complements the myth of the ideal reader, and both are conveniently misleading.

The remarkable ignorance regarding book history and usage by those who first designed digital book readers led to costly and avoidable mistakes for Amazon, Barnes & Noble (the sad Nook) and Apple. The confident predictions of futurists and disruptors have time and again been left blowin' in the wind even as books have changed significantly at every turn of technology, social history, and political ideology.

The jacket image and design perfectly illustrate Price's points: red bordered page scrolling around bindings suggest the codex, the scroll, readers' uses and abuses, as well as the flames that have consumed libraries, readers, and régimes (the biblioclastic Fahrenheit 451; Winston Smith's tell-tale paperweight in 1984; Savonarola's, Trollope's, and Tom Wolfe's bonfires of vanities and Josef Goebbel's bonfires of books and their authors). As in Matthew Battles' The Library: An Unquiet History, books have as often attracted scorn and destruction as they have acclaim and conservation: books as sources of power, fear, and disruption.

Price's book is subtitled The History and Future of Reading. Universities often discount the presence of books because they are so routine. Undergraduates who seem unwilling, unable, or simply disinclined to read (as assigned, or on their own) may not be the accurate bell-weather faculty and administrators believe them to be. Sales and circulation of printed and digital books were both up during the pandemic, sometimes constrained by availability. Book sales were up 12% between June and mid-August 2020 compared with ten weeks' prior numbers.

Books have at the forefront of numerous developments in marketing: door-to-door marketing, consumer credit, self-serve retail sales, and online direct. Every time books have been proclaimed as dead (including Thomas Edison's confident predictions in 1913), they have had a way of sneaking back, whether hardbound, paperbound, or digital, print or serialized. Much hinges on whether time for reading of any kind will be available in surveillance gig-work economy. Price is confidently warns that "the experience of immersion in a world made of words will survive in and only if readers continue to carve out places and times to have words with one another."

Published on

Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explain: Design and Pattern in Narrative rises from her own interest in narratives that proceed in patterns other than the classic Aristotelian arc (conflict, complication, rising action, climax, dénouement). This not only strikes her as "something that swells and tautens until it collapses" (very male), but also very dependent upon the power relations that characterize many sexual acts. John Gardner tied this to the "energeic" novel: exposition, development, dénounment: something happens, something changes. But fiction doesn't merely narrate. Alison is seeking a fiction that is organic, but not necessarily orgasmic.

She finds an alternative in Peter Steven's 1974 book Patterns in Nature. (Stevens is an architect.) There are several ways that energy can propagate through space and matter in the nature of the universe. His ideas were updated in a different direction by Philip Ball with a book with the same title. (Ball was an editor of Nature.). Alison takes such natural patterns: spiral (fiddlehead fern, whirlpool), meander (river), explosion or radial (splash of dripping water), as well as cellular, fractal and branching patterns. "There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn't they form our narratives, too?" (p. 22)

Alison goes on in the book to read fiction with an eye towards these patterns, with a lively set of authors: W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcîa Márquez, Marguerite Duras, Tobias Wolff, Nicholson Baker. Each of these sets out fiction that takes a variety of narrative forms, building up patterns that spiral, twist, meander, explode, or form repetitive multiple perspectives that build a text differently from a single sweeping narrative. They do this even as all literature has to negotiate the word-by-word sequential act of reading, line by line.

I wondered if Alison might consider fiction or literature in other languages (not only through translation): how differently sentences can function in inflected languages such as German, Russian, or Greek, with the puzzles that can be placed within clauses finally to resolve in patterns by the end of the sentence. (The old joke about Thomas Mann's last work: he died before he could get to the verb.)

This is a very lively book that rewards reflection and thought, and it has led me to read authors I would not otherwise have read (probably), as well as re-read authors differently. I'm more aware of the variety of narrative forms that Dostoyevesky uses in a long work such as The Karamazov Brothers, and how these multiple layers of texts, some set pieces, build upon each other. What is the relationship, for example, of the famous episode "The Grand Inquisitor" with the process of Dimitri Karamzov's trial?

This book is not a how-to, but it made me want to write , to imagine. Alison is a novelist who teaches writing at the University of Virginia, and a wonderful translator of Ovid's tales of eroticism and strange sexuality in Change Me, based on Amores and Metamorphoses.