This is in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin with. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers.
The undistracted widow barnes and noble movie#
The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. The glow of a screen as darkness encroaches seems, by comparison, eerie and malevolent.īut it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. When Wallace Stevens, the supreme poet of winter dusk, celebrated the “first light of evening,” it was likely a reading lamp. 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. Insert, where the reader was, a person on his device, and function becomes décor-which, Price suggests, is what books now are for many of us. Take away the book and the reader, and the whole design of the room starts to feel a little sad, the way a nursery feels once the baby grows up. Prolonged arrangement 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 person does on a screen. I am writing this on a laptop in a room designed almost entirely for reading physical books-a room that now bears “the ghostly imprint of outdated objects,” as Price puts it. Nobody would try to pop a cyst with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone. His remedy, delivered cheerfully in a French accent, has stuck with me: “Slam it with a book.”Īs Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic), physical books-which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be obsolete-show no signs of going away. The doctor examined it and told me it was a harmless fluid deposit-nothing to worry about. Twenty years ago, I had a very large bump on my wrist. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster. 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 literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī physical book is good for much more than reading.
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