Reason-R-Us

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• Jun-18 - Roz, a/k/a Zenda Bloglink — Books started out as scratches in the rock walls of caves, 'Preface' pages to our most ancient history. It's not easy to start reading on a monitor, be interrupted by a phone call or the dog scratching to come in or a child crying in an upstairs room, then pick up again. Then a daytime thunderstorm knocks out the power for an hour,can't go outside, left hanging at a critical turn of plot. The bound book is patient. While dashing around tending to tasks,from the corner of an eye one can see it waiting on a shelf,by a chair, by the bed.The book can be touched, one on one,a magic doorway. We were visiting our son and his family in Florida some years ago, and watched a nine-year-old grand-daughter standing barefoot on her open book on the floor - she so desperately wanted to physically walk into the story she had started reading.I know how she felt. Another time, walking into a large B&Nm my husband stopped, stood, and from the depths of his heart said:" This makes me want to live...  Show Full Comment
• Jun-17 - Easy Writer (ChadMcGrew) — Peter, Thank you ever so much for taking the time to write that. It pretty much agrees with my own feelings on the matter. I do rue the day when everyone is playing with their 'readers' though, and I'm socked away in my musty home library like one of the characters in Fahrenheit 451. But you're probably right on that point as well. I'll almost certainly be dead by then or at least senile.
• Jun-17 - Peter Rubie — Chandler, thanks for the kind words. I think it was Mark Twain who once noticed an obituary for himself and commented on the fact of his death being greatly exaggerated. I think this is true of the purported demise of books. We are all in danger of losing the thread a bit here. The "book" is and of itself an inanimate object. It's something we have a sensual connection to, it is childhood and sitting on someone's knee, or snuggled beside them while they read aloud to us. It may be something we love, being "book people," but people were muttering about the demise of literature when the mass market paperback started to take hold, and I'm sure somewhere in history there was a monk who spent his whole life illustrating and copying manuscripts who looked at Guttenberg's loud, smelly, dirty invention and bemoaned the fact that the hand crafted book would soon fade from existence. Whether it's hand crafted, printed on a clanking dirty machine and then bound, or conjured up from the ether...  Show Full Comment