The Physics of Reading
by
Nicki Leone
There is a scene in Mary Renault’s novel of ancient Greece, The Praise Singer, where the poet Simonides comes upon his favorite pupil engaged in a most unusual activity: He gazed at the wax with his stylos poised, and hummed the same phrase two or three times over; then again with a different word. On that he rubbed at the wax, and wrote something. It was only then that I knew what he was doing. It shook me to my root.Simonides had learned his art in an era of oral tradition, where poetry was recited—sung—and where a poet’s memory was his first and best skill. He had been at great pains to teach young Bacchylides the works of Homer, line by musical line. Writing he regards as cheating—the pathetic crutch of a lazy mind. It has been some fifteen hundred years since Renault’s imagined moment when Simonides first stared, aghast, at his student scratching out songs on wax, but the tone of his dismay is a familiar one. Every generation laments the bad habits of the next, every era sees in the technological advances of their sons and daughters the impending doom of their way of life. And not without reason. Simonides was indulging in a bit of hyperbole when he claimed writing would be the death of poetry, but he was not wrong in pointing out that a culture that writes things down has no need to remember. His tradition of oral recitation was indeed disappearing. There isn’t much call to recite the whole of the Iliad these days, although I can tell you it is a beautiful experience, should you ever have the chance to hear it done. I’ve been hearing that dismayed tone of lament quite a lot lately. For better or for worse, I seem to have been born into an era that is marked by one of those sea-changes brought about by technology. The book—an object that has been in use since it first replaced the papyrus scroll nearly two thousand years ago, a piece of technology whose stability and utility has remained unchanged for longer than almost anything else in our daily lives with possible exception of the wheel—the book is at last in danger of becoming obsolete. Or so they say. I have my doubts. The recent advent of eBook technology, where books are downloaded rather than printed, turned on rather than opened, licensed rather than owned, has thrown the book world into a panicked state not unlike Simonides’ own at the notion that poetry might be written instead of sung. For the first time we may be looking at a fundamental change in the form of the book. So fundamental, in fact, that we may need a new word for it. Music is music and songs are songs, but “LPs” are not “CDs” and bands no longer release “albums.” It is entirely possible that whatever it is you are reading on your new Kindle, the word “book” doesn’t accurately identify it. Now I am not technologically phobic. Quite the reverse. I have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and know my way around html and php code. I like data and the Internet is an endless playground of data. The only reason I am not an “early adopter” is simply because it is an expensive hobby to be the first kid on the block with a new gizmo, and (more importantly) because I am fundamentally too pragmatic (and busy) to be spending much time debugging the latest bit of shiny on the market. But I bought a cell phone as soon as it was practical, switched from desktop to laptop the moment they came within my price range and could do everything I needed a computer to do, and went from phone line to cable to wireless as soon as it no longer required an advanced degree in computer science to turn my house into a wifi hotspot. So I am not “afraid” of eBooks. I rather delight in watching the developing technology behind what’s known as “epaper” and “electronic ink.” There is not a doubt in my mind that eventually most people will do their reading online and experience literature electronically. It is the nature of that experience that I find myself thinking about most frequently these days. I bought my first and only eBook way back in the year 2000—which in technological years is on a par with monks scribbling away in their scriptoriums—when Stephen King tried releasing a new novel, Riding the Bullet, exclusively in eBook form. At the time it cost me $2.50 and half an hour to install the software I needed to read it. And my conclusion was that $2.50 was all it was worth. A brand new shiny format doesn’t do much good if the story is bad. Riding the Bullet was not one of King’s better works. Significantly, I came to this conclusion only after I printed out the story to read it on paper. Reading it on the computer, I was too conscious of the medium to become truly involved in the story. From that moment on, I was aware that I read things differently depending on the medium. That the way I read a book is different from the way I read online. And it isn’t simply a question of the technology being unequal to its task. I can adjust to reading computer screens with about the same amount of effort that I can adjust to reading a book or magazine with small type. It’s an annoyance, but that is all. No, I realized that my problem with reading online or electronically was much more fundamental—what I read online just didn’t feel as real to me. It is hard for book lovers to talk about eBooks not being “real” without sounding like a group of nostalgic, curmudgeonly luddites. They talk about how books feel and smell, wax eloquent about the texture of the paper, the design of the jacket, the weight in their hands. And these things are dismissed by proponents of eBooks, by Kindle users and Sony eBook readers and iPhone owners, who cite instead the benefits of carrying all of the up to 1,500 books in your library with you wherever you go, the “green” nature of ebooks (which is debatable), and the convenience of a book where the type can be sized to your specifications, linked to other resources, and “forever” stored online on some server owned by Amazon (but never to be shared with others—a dark side to the eBook model that deserves more attention than it has received). Besides, Pride and Prejudice is Pride and Prejudice whether you read it in an Everyman Classic hardcover, a Penguin classic paperback, or as a download from the Gutenberg Online archive, right? Well, not for me. Reading is an active process and I have discovered that my brain is at its most active, its most focused, when I am reading from a physical book. Those things eBook readers dismiss as nostalgic or old fashioned, such as the importance of how a book feels or the way it smells or even sounds as the pages are turned, they are all part of that active reading process for me. Reading a “real” book is a multi-sensory experience, and I am much more likely to be impacted and absorbed when all my senses are engaged. Touch is especially important. I mark my time through a book by the steady turn of pages, the ever-changing weight of what I have read versus what is still to come. Reading an eBook is slightly disorienting because the beginning of a book feels exactly the same as the middle and the end. There is no sense that I am making any headway at all, but rather just floating along in some endless electronic file. Everything seems to exist without context. Educational researcher Anne Mangen recently identified this sense of disorientation in an article published in the Journal of Research in Reading in November, 2008 called, somewhat obscurely, “Hypertext fiction reading: haptic and immersion.” Mangen was studying effects of reading comprehension in print and online content and came to the conclusion that online reading hampered comprehension and was less rewarding, although she acknowledged that the problem may well be generational. Basically, reading online was too distracting: The process involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we're reading; online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness; and multimedia features, such as links to videos and animations, leave little room for imagination, limiting our ability to form our own mental pictures to illustrate what we're reading. (Emphasis mine)That quote comes from an article about the study published in Scientific American on December 28, 2008 which I found, not so ironically, online. The notion that reading online hampers the imagination rather than encouraging it was rather forcibly demonstrated to me when I went looking for the excerpt that began this article. I Googled Simonides, to make sure I had my dates correct. And even now, after reading through several Wiki articles and a number of classical reference sites, I would have to go back and look up specifics, which exist in my head only as a series of bookmarks and “del.ici.ous” tags to be called for when needed. On the other hand, referring back to the actual book was a different experience entirely. Naturally, being who I am, while I was paging through The Praise Singer in search of that remembered scene (remembered, mind you, from when I first read the book more than thirty years ago and found relatively quickly because I even remembered where in the novel it occurs) I became absorbed in the story and found myself re-reading it. To quote from one randomly chosen passage: “The taverner kept for him his favorite cup, black on white figured Lakonian, smooth as an egg. When he picked it up, you saw the delicate touch of those big fingers.” I did indeed see. I’m sure that you see. And while you and I may envision different cups, different fingers, whatever we have created in our minds remains vivid and real. Now imagine if you were reading that description, but the word “Lakonian” was hyperlinked to a Wikipedia article on Lakonian pottery, or “taverner” a link to the Dictionary.com definition. Suddenly, the picture in your head is incomplete, because you know there is other information available that may be relevant to your understanding of the story. You are compelled to click on those links, interrupt your narrative, assimilate a lot of information about Greek pottery circa 480 BC and only when that is done can you return to your reading, the picture in your head now not completely your own imagination, but instead something someone else has told you should be there. It is because of reactions like this that I have decided I am apparently hardwired to read best in print. Online content—whether it is books or poems or discussions I have with friends on social networking sites—remains oddly insubstantial to me, disappearing from my mind the moment I click away, perhaps because I am conscious that everything is a simple CRTL+F (“find”) or Google search away. And if one of those websites, blogs, or discussion forums goes dark, disappears, is taken offline, well, I will never notice. There is no glaring gap in my virtual bookshelf to mark its disappearance. It may as well have never existed for all the impact it has upon my intellectual life. I may be frustrated by a few 404 “site not found errors” but the impact of these online losses is absolutely nil. Reading a physical book on the other hand, just by the nature of its permanency, its unarguable existence in the real world, offers something palliative to my psyche that electronic media can't. Believe me, I notice the gaps on my real bookshelves. I notice when something has been taken down, lent out, or misplaced. My real books also carry real psychological weight. I have written most of my work for the last ten years on my laptop and I have never once developed a sense of affection for my computer. I replace them easily and frequently, worried only about the data on the hard drive, not the laptop itself. The computer is soulless. Not so my books. There is a sense that this book is different from any other because it is mine; it passed through my hands, has my inscriptions and dedications and notes in the margins which will continue to exist even if I give it away. That this object, which may have once belonged to my mother, and will then perhaps be lent to my best friend when I’m done with it, carries its own history and story with it, along with whatever story is told on its pages. And we are at least subconsciously aware of this other story, are we not? Of the story of the object that comes along with the story in the object? Even if we don't know a book’s history, we know it has one, because it exists. Which is not something you can say about your average downloaded file. That implied permanency changes the way I read. I read more "permanently" because of it—a fact that was illustrated for me best in my reaction to a poem by Wilfred Owen called “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”: So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,I first came across this poem in a novel by Pat Barker called Regeneration, a famous antiwar story of the horrors of World War I. My experience of the story and the poem that ends it was underscored by the fact that when I was reading it the United States had just gone to war in Afghanistan—something I was personally against. So for a period I found myself recommending Regeneration to book clubs for discussion, and sending friends links and copies of the poem via e-mail. And each time I did so, I would do a quick search online for something like “wilfred owen old man young” to find it. Despite the dozens of times I did this, I never re-read the poem once, confident that it was only an online search away and content to hold on to my original impressions, colored as they were by Barker’s novel and her choice of that poem to sum up all the awful, tragic hubris that is in the nature of war. It wasn’t until I was at my own book club, discussing the book and the poem, that I realized that I didn’t know it well enough to recite even a part of it accurately; that despite sending links and copies to all and sundry, I had not bothered to really read the poem again. That evening I went home and printed the poem out (again, from some source on the Internet) and taped it above my desk, where I could look at it whenever I felt like it. I bought a collection of Owen’s poems, and a biography, and even listened, with my eyes closed, to the poem as it was recited at the end of the movie version of Regeneration, Behind the Lines. And it is only now, having read and re-read and even listened to it and recited it, that I feel like I know it, like it has gotten into my bloodstream and changed me. At least to the point that I was able to write it out above without going to look it up. And perhaps more significantly, to the point where I heard the echoes of that poem every time I watched the news. Nothing I have ever read online has echoed in my life that way. Simonides eventually accepts his pupil’s unorthodox method of composing in wax. He admits the poem Bacchylides has created is his best work yet, and he acknowledges that his pupil’s way of learning seems to work for him. Each generation finds its own way to its own voice. Simonides tells a story of how he used to sing for his keep in a tavern, although his own poet-master thought it would be pollute his talent. “I found it an education,” he says to the boy. “There are plenty of paths to Helikon. Just don’t lose sight of the top.” I don’t think the eBook signals the “death of the book” anymore than the stylos signaled the death of poetry. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that a piece of technology that will last about two to three years before becoming obsolete will be capable of replacing a piece of technology that has lasted several thousand years without becoming irrelevant. So I’ll never make it to the top of Helikon in a Kindle. But I don’t begrudge those who will. If I want to read their stories, however, I’ll have to print them out. Books mentioned in this column: The Praise Singer by Mary Renault (Vintage Books, 2003) Regeneration by Pat Barker (Plume, 1993) Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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