books will not die

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on November 29th, 2010 at 07:01 AM | | Tweet

... is deep thinking still relevant? Are we better served, from a purely Darwinian perspective, by re-developing our hunter-gatherer skills--responding quick and quicker to the flashiest flash?

I came home from a week-long holiday last night to find one of our pet snakes stuck between a thermometer and duct tape.  The adhesive had wound around its head and congealed to its skin there.  Who knows how long this snake had been thrashing, trying to rid itself of the suffocating predicament. My husband and I grabbed the snake (a lovely red corn snake we’ve had since it was a baby—it’s now about two feet long), and after a somewhat surgical extraction, we watched the poor fellow recover by gulping water and writhing about its glass house with flickering tongue and gleam in eye.

There is nothing more heartening, thrilling, and scary to watch than utter resilience marked by the propensity for survival.  As we readers and book people watch a behemoth industry thrash about in the duct tape of the times, there is that same adrenaline-fueled gut-lurch: books are under attack from myriad forces, but they will not die.

In response to the challenge set forth by its author, David Ulin, I read The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time in one sitting.  I read the book during the chunk of I-5 between Bakersfield and Sacramento while my husband drove that leg of the long journey home.  I felt alternately trapped and indulgent as I made my way through the 151-page book. Rebellious and Catholic.  Bored and attentive.  In short, I experienced the array of emotions I do when I’m caught between observation and reflection.

But my response to the book is by no means universal. Christopher Beha’s November 26 review of Ulin’s ruminative essay is much more polemic. He concludes, “...it’s difficult to picture such a person buying and reading this feathered-out version of the essay in book form,” while acknowledging that, “there is no pleasure to be had in dealing roughly with a work as well meaning as Ulin’s.”  To these assertions, I completely disagree—but then, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool outlier on many levels. Of the first point, nerds of my ilk will buy this book and digest it, bringing to the page their unique responses—good or bad.  To the second point, Beha is all too gleeful in his didactic dismantling of Ulin’s meditation on reading, and it’s annoying to watch a reviewer give himself a caveat that smells of fear of retribution (Ulin is an L.A. Times book critic).

But all that aside, the issue here is fueling the ongoing conversation about the cultural significance—the worth—of the printed page.  And this: is deep thinking still relevant?  Or: are we better served, from a purely Darwinian perspective, by re-developing our hunter-gatherer skills—responding quick and quicker to the flashiest flash? Even, scarily: will the percolators among us be left in anachronistic dust whilst gazing at what remains of our navels?  Ulin travels to those places as he thrashes about in his inquisition.

As a culture our tastes are subject to the current needs of survival.  My son, a recent graduate (go Ducks) in accounting, plays online poker for a living.  He plays eight games at once and makes more money doing it than any of his similarly degreed peers. He identifies and devours anything relevant to his livelihood as it appears on the screen in front of him.  The only books on his shelf are strategy books—winning at poker tomes.  He is not, nor never will be, interested in watching an author follow his or her depth of inquiry on the page.  He is the snake that chose not to burrow between the thermometer and the duct tape and sits atop the shavings today, fat and sassy as ever.

As for me—I’ll go down with the ship, thrashing all the way.  In his book, Ulin points to one of my favorite author quotes, Joan Didion, who wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”  And, if I have any faith at all, it’s knowing that in this archaic practice, I am not alone.