more thoughts on reading e-books

As I've spent more time reading on my iPad, I've come to more realizations about how I read. The most surprising thing is how much I miss sharing books. This is more complicated than it sounds. I knew, of course, that you can't really share e-books, but I have never really been someone who likes to share books. I'm happy to borrow books, but I get nervous loaning mine out. They come back beat up, or they don't come back at all and then I resent the person who has my book, or I can't remember who I loaned it to and it's gone forever. So I'm not a big book sharer. And since my family shares a single Kindle account, my spouse and my son and I can all share books across our devices--even better, we can read that book simultaneously on our separate devices. But what I failed to account for is the fact that I do actually loan out my books. Not often, and not with very many people. But there are a couple of friends I would like to be able to loan a book to, and sharing books with my sister was one of the important ways that we stayed connected with each other. I hadn't even realized how much it mattered to me to be able to exchange books with her until my Kindle reading got in the way. We're currently exploring sharing an account, since she and I have more similar tastes in reading than my husband and I do. (The fact that the Alpha Gadgeteer and I rarely enjoy the same books took me a long time to adjust to--it can be hard, when reading is so important to you, to not be able to share it with someone you love.) So sharing books with my sister makes a lot of sense, especially as it's a way of sharing our bond with each other in a pleasurable way, when so many of our other points of connection require more difficult emotions.

So one of the thing that I've rediscovered through reading on my iPad is that reading can be strongly tied to social connections. We exchange books as a way of saying, "I love you" or "I'm thinking of you" or any of a host of other emotions that connect us to each other.

Another thing that I've rediscovered is that we each individually read different texts in different ways. I had some sense of this in my post about false endings, in which I commented that most of my e-book reading was of thrillers, stories that pull me forward into their plot. But as I've spent more time with this contraption, and as I've let my book-buying habits expand, I've come to realize that there are some books I really would prefer to read in paper codex form. Some of this has to do with how I navigate the text: some works ask me to read them slowly, to revisit earlier passages, to refer back to past points in the narrative. Some works deserve to have a graphic presentation that reflects their content, a font that was chosen deliberately for them, a paper stock that makes up their heft, or their lack of it.

The iPad has worked fabulously well for me when I was reading Stieg Larsson's trilogy or Justin Cronin's The Passage. In fact, it worked ideally. I didn't have to wait to make it to a bookstore to start reading the 2nd book after I finished the 1st (something, of course, that was true only because I didn't start reading them until the entire series was out). And I didn't have to awkwardly hold the 700-plus pages of The Passage as I sped through it. (And I was less likely to throw my iPad against the wall in my annoyance at the ending than I would have been with the book itself. I know it's the first part of a trilogy, but sheesh!) And given that I do a lot of my reading at night, in bed, with my glasses off and the font greatly enlarged, I do speed through these books--there's not room for lots of words on the screen when you're reading in a big font. You just read, click, read, click, read, click. Any sense of physical movement through the book is greatly diminished. And that's fine. It worked with how I was experiencing those books anyway. I was reading them to find out what happened next. I cared about the characters and the language just enough to make me care about the plot.

But now I'm reading Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, and though I'm not very far into it, I'm finding that I really wish I was reading it in book form. I haven't been able to quite put my finger on it (there's an apt metaphor for you), but I need to be able to sink further into it, to take my time with it, and reading it on my iPad is somehow getting in the way of that.

It's possible this is less about the iPad and more about The Finkler Question. After my father died, a few years ago, I lost the ability to read any serious fiction. I was in the middle of reading English, August and it was a great book, but I put it down and couldn't pick it back up. Instead I picked up Tony Hillerman. And then I devoured a lot of P. D. James, and I discovered Laura Lippman, and a whole lot of not very good chick lit that I mostly don't recall. This got better, slowly, and I discovered that I could read What is the What, even though Philip Roth was off limits. I loved The Imperfectionists. And I never lost the ability to read some of my old favorites, like Jane Eyre. But I still sometimes hit an unexpected wall when I'm reading. I know other people who have had similar experiences, and I know that some people get back to their old ways of reading, and I continue to hope that will be true for me too.

My point in sharing this is that we have different ways of reading different books. I was fine reading novels about death. But there was a category of books that felt like they asked too much of me: I needed to commit to them, to enter into their world, to let them take charge of me. And perhaps it was that I felt too unsettled in my own world to do that, but I simply couldn't read those books. I needed to be able to stay on the surface of what I was reading.

So perhaps that's what my problem is with The Finkler Question. It's asking too much of me, and I'm still not ready to read that way. But I think, too, that the iPad has something to do with this. It's very easy to race through reading on the iPad. All texts look the same in the Kindle app, and sometimes they start to blur together. Maybe I can retrain myself to read more slowly even on my iPad, to take my time with the feel of the language. I might still be able to rewire some of my perceptual habits.

But I don't know that I will. I had an exchange with one of my children that made me think that as much as I do love reading on my iPad, I don't love all types of reading on my iPad. I had bought Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass for my son, and have been really pleased that he's been enjoying it. (He and I often do share similar tastes in reading, and to be able to share favorite books with your child is even more lovely than to share them with your spouse.) But I inadvertently ordered the mass market paperback for him, and the font is fairly small, especially compared to the books normally printed for kids to read. So although he's enjoying the book, he was feeling a bit frustrated with the print, and it seemed to me it was making the book a bit harder than it needed to be. He's enjoyed reading books on our Kindle before, so I bought the Kindle edition of The Golden Compass--less than $8 and then I can read it on my iPad along with him! But he soon decided that he preferred reading it as a book. Yes, the type was bigger on the Kindle, and yes, he'd enjoyed reading some Rick Riordan books on it. But this time it wasn't working for him. It felt better as a book. I think he felt similar to how I feel about The Finkler Question. Some books you need to focus on, and you need to do that in book form.

false endings

I've been thinking a lot recently about the experience of reading. Part of this is about the technologies of reading, but part of this is about the nature of reading and processing words.

Some context is helpful here: this spring we sold our house and moved into a new house. As part of this process, we overhauled the old house, cleaning it out and making it look fabulously inviting (those of you who watch a lot of HGTV or live in housing-market-obsessed areas will recognize this as "staging", a term that deserves its own post on an entirely different blog). We bowed to the wisdom of our realtor, who went through our house and identified the furniture and clutter that ought to be cleared out. Right up at the top of the list were all of our bookshelves and, obviously, books. This is the point when my bookish friends yelp in horror--"Why are books unattractive?!"--but as someone who has been shopping for houses, I have to agree with the realtor on this point. Books mark a space as belonging to a specific person, someone, in this case, who is not you. If you are a Jane Austen fan, are you going to see yourself living in a space marked by Dan Brown books? I can't tell you the number of times I looked at a house and instead of being perplexed by the kitchen layout found myself thinking, "do these people really need to own so many books about football?" Equally crucial is the point that bookcases take up room--if you've got two walls lined with books, the livable space of the room feels tinier, and who wants to buy a house that is already clearly tiny and cramped? In any case, we packed up all our books. We own a lot of books. Seventy boxes of books, in fact. We packed them up in mid-April, and, for a variety of reasons having to do with renovations and the chaos of moving, those books remain boxed up and will probably stay boxed up for another six to nine months.

When I see it written down like that, I want to cry--that's a long time to go without my books! But while I miss my physical books, I have not stopped reading. But instead of buying books, or checking books out of my library (that's a different problem I won't go into here), I now read e-books on a variety of devices: Kindle, iPad, iPod Touch. And, it turns out, I love reading on these devices. I love that with the Kindle app I can start off reading a book on a Kindle, transfer it to my iPod, and sync it so that my son can devour his own novel on the Kindle while I'm at work. At night I can read on my iPad, with grey words glowing on black background without ever waking my husband, The Alpha Gadgeteer (it's thanks to him that we have this plethora of devices). And, oh, the seduction of being able to think of a book you'd like to read, buy it, and start reading it seconds later!

This isn't a post about the pros and cons of e-books and the readers that are out there, however. Rather, I've been struck by some of the differences between the experience of reading on the iPad and reading a book. For starters, and this continues to catch me out, when I'm reading on the iPad I have no sense of the passage of travel through the narrative. What I mean is, if I need to go back to double-check something that happened earlier, I have no sense of how many screens back it is--I'll think it's just a couple of finger swipes, but it's really a couple dozen swipes. The same thing happens at the end of the book--I have no idea how close to the end of the story I am. Is this seeming wrap-up of the action the false ending that lulls you into a calm before Jason bursts up from the lake and the last survivor has to take him on yet again? (I know I've mixed my book and movie references there, but that moment in Friday the 13th continues to haunt me, decades later. Perhaps it's the glossiness of the iPad that makes me think about movies; that and the fact that I've been reading lots of thrillers on it.) With a book in your hand, you have a sense of how many pages are left before the narrative wraps up, assuming that it's not a cliff-hanger or that the end of the book isn't padded with the opening chapters of the next book in a series. With the iPad Kindle app, there is no continuously visible marker of passage though the text. You read until you done, and you know you're done because you swipe your finger and the cover appears. (Yes, the cover. The app begins the book on what it thinks is the first page of main text, which means that in some books, you have to go backwards until you get to the start of the prologue.)

This realization that I don't know where I am in the forward movement of the story points to something oddly old-fashioned about reading this way, something that James O'Donnell has noted, too:

The Kindle is great for reading the way ancient Greeks read, on papyrus scrolls, beginning at the beginning, proceeding linearly, getting to the end, absorbed in one book, following the author's lead.

While the technology delivering the text is new-fangled, the reading itself is decidedly not. (O'Donnell, who is a classicist and Provost of Georgetown University, knows something about how ancient Greeks read; he has a short piece about his Kindle in the Chronicle of Higher Education, from which the above is quoted. He also delivered a talk at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library on "A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read" this past April which you can watch on YouTube.)


I expect I'll adjust to the newness of the iPad and will someday no longer be caught out by the surprise of a story ending before I realize it. And I certainly don't always want to read in this linear fashion (there's a reason why I've been reading the type of fiction I have on it, but not any of the scholarship that I otherwise read). But for right now, it's fun to experience reading in a different way.


This is a pretty short and easy post as I try to get back in the habit of blogging again. I hadn't meant to be gone for so long, but sometimes life gets in the way (see that whole packing/selling/buying/moving drama above). As the fall approaches I am again thinking about early modern books, how to teach book history, and how to marry new technologies with old books. For the couple of you who might have hung in there during my long absence, it's nice to see you again, and I'll do better by you in the future!

being a reader in rare book libraries

I've been thinking recently about what it means to be a reader in a rare books library, a place like the Folger, or the British Library, or the Beinecke, for instance. That is, the sort of place where the lucky among us get to do research and routinely handle rare materials.

I think about this topic often while I am teaching my undergraduate course on book history. Undergraduates are not typically allowed into rare book libraries--I've heard stories that even some university special collections don't like to let students handle their materials, an attitude which is sorely misguided and shameful and not, I hope, actually common. But because undergrads are only a recent, and quite small, presence in the Folger reading rooms, I worry that they might be looked at askance by other readers. And because it is a wonderful thing that the Folger lets my students have full access to the collections, I am especially careful to train them on how to be good library citizens.

I tend to think of being a good library citizen as common sense: there are the usual rare materials guidelines (no bags, no food or drink, no pens) and the usual library protocal (cell phones off, voices quiet, don't turn up your ipod so loud that others can hear it--actually, that last one comes from my own private distate of ipods in libraries, a quirk that might be mine alone).

What needs to be taught more explicitly, of course, is how to handle rare materials: use foam supports and book weights, don't force the binding to open further than it wants to, turn the pages carefully, wash your hands frequently. In my experience, students take to this instruction quite well. They are thrilled with the privilege of having access to these books, and they want to treat them with care and respect. And they really get it, especially once you explain the principle behind proper usage: the oils on your skin will leave marks on the page; if you force the binding it will break; if you flip through the pages, the edges will tear. If you can show them the structure of a binding--how the boards are attached, how the gatherings are stitched together--then it makes even more sense. The basic point of such handling techniques is obvious, especially to students of book history. Use the books with respect so that others can learn from them in the future.


But what I've been thinking about recently is not how to handle rare materials, but how to handle rare materials users. This is something that librarians are always conscious of, along with the need to balance access to materials with preservation of those materials. Go too much to either extreme, and nothing makes sense anymore. Too much access, and the materials will disintegrate. Not enough access, and what's the point of keeping them? I kvetch about digital surrogates sometimes, and how much information is lost when you are looking at an image of something rather than the thing itself. But one thing that facsimiles do is to protect materials. The first round of information that a reader is looking to gather can often be found through looking at a facsimile or other surrogate; some will need eventual access to the original, but even if the number of uses is reduced by only a third, it's still a reduction.

More tricky is the need to balance attracting readers into your collection with protecting the collection. The British Library's recent installation of hand sanitizers during the swine flu scare is a perfect example of this. They installed the sanitizers to make their visitors and readers feel more secure in coming to the Library, but then they had to remind readers that the sanitizer could damage Library materials if it wasn't used properly (let it dry, people!). In her post on this, bookn3rd saw this as "as a tug-of-war between our society’s panic over disease and the continuous, low-level panic of managing library collections" (her parenthetical insert in the previous sentence would have been the even more sensible injunction, "just wash your hands, people!").

But I want to think about the question of what it means to be a reader in a rare book library not from the perspective of a librarian (since I'm not a librarian) or of an institution (since I'm not an institution, either). What does it mean to us, as readers in libraries, to be a reader of rare materials? What are our responsibilities to those materials, to the library, and to the other readers?

Since I assume that you, my lovely readers, either know how to handle rare books or would teach yourselves how to do that before you start handling them (more on that in a minute), one of our collective responsibilities is to help other readers handle their materials safely. That might mean intervening yourself, or it might mean getting a librarian to come to the rescue. I certainly realize that it's not as easy to do as that. We tend to come from a world that punishes snitches and whistle-blowers rather than the wrong-doers. And most of the time we come to libraries to do our research, not be on the look-out for what other people are doing. (Well, I hear stories about rampant flirting in libraries, but you know what I mean.) I can think of instances when I saw something in a reading room and I thought "what?!" and let that be the end of the situation. In my defense, the most recent time, I was stunned that someone would try to staunch their bloody nose while sitting in the reading room rather than in the privacy of a bathroom--and the books on the table weren't from a restricted collection but from the modern stacks. But still, I wish I had said something. Blood on a rare book is bad, but blood on a modern book isn't good either.

The problem with my reticence, and the reticence that I know many of us feel in the face of poor library behavior, is that we too often rely on librarians to be the caretakers of rare materials, rather than seeing it as a collective scholarly responsibility.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be visiting a number of libraries (including the fabulous British Library), looking at promptbooks and other rare materials. I'll wash my hands thoroughly and let them dry completely, I promise! I'll be careful with the materials. And I'll try to speak up if I see someone who needs help. Or at least I'll go find someone who can speak up.

postscript:

For those of you who would like some instruction on how to safely handle rare materials: The best way to learn what to do is to ask a librarian; she or he will be able to inform you about general practices and show what the policies are of that specific library. You can also find some information online, including written guides from the libraries at Univerisity of British Columbia and University of Southern California, and videos demonstrating handling practices for a wide range of materials from the BL.

One last word: The photo heading this post is of a highly responsible reader in the Folger's Old Reading Room, a reader who happens to be one of my former students. And check out the use she's making of surrogate materials: she's comparing two copies of a book, one held in our collection (nicely supported on foam) and one from EEBO. Just makes you want to come for a visit, doesn't it?

what do Daily Show correspondents read?

This is not my usual style of post, but since my last topic was that of reading, I cannot resist this timely contribution on the subject from The Daily Show's correspondents:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Ask a Correspondent - Books
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

reading and re-reading

A couple of stories have been making the rounds this week, reminding me how deep and powerful reading can be.

Top at the list is Sonia Sotomayor and her love of Nancy Drew, a biographical detail that features in the White House's official press release about her nomination and has been repeated in countless stories. Today's Sunday New York Times expands the significance of Nancy Drew and the Supreme Court: it's not only Sotomayor who read her as a girl, but Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Part of the article focuses on the appeal a "nice" girl like Nancy holds for women challenging male professions. Nancy Drew gets to rule her own life, be as smart as she wants to me, have adventures, and still be loved and respected. But the article also includes a second observation from Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her:

A charge “rightly leveled” against the early books, Ms. Rehak says, “is that they were racist — all the villains were ‘foreign’ or ‘swarthy,’ and all the African-Americans were portrayed as second class in terms of intelligence, profession, etc.” She said that “one of the things I find so interesting about Sotomayor’s citing of Nancy is that even she, as a Puerto Rican child, just looked past all of that and took away with her the essence of Nancy.”

I would take a slightly different observation from this. Rather than seeing Sotomayor as someone who looked past what was troubling, I see her reading of Nancy Drew as an instance of resistant reading--she reshaped the narrative and its characters to be what she needed them to be. I'm not sure she was resisting in the subversive way that Judith Fetterly explored, turning the assumptions of a text against themselves, but I would certainly guess that Sotomayor's affection for Nancy Drew included a thoughtful response to the entire text.

Although I haven't seen it reflected in the stories about her, I wonder whether Sotomayor has gone back and reread Nancy Drew and what she makes of them now. If Nancy was the reason she wanted to become a lawyer, what does she think of her now that she is a judge? That kind of rereading and revisiting is the subject of Verlyn Klinkenborg's latest Editorial Observer, a feature of the NYT that I usually find goofy, with lots of reminscing about farmers and rural life that seems overly nostalgic to me. But this piece, "Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader," was a sweet tribute to the joys of reading again and again.

Perhaps it spoke to me because I am in the middle of rereading, as always. Rereading is the nature of my scholarship, of course. I can't begin to count the number of times I have now read King Lear (and read resistingly), and I know that I'll be rereading As You Like It more times than I really care to consider. But it's a big part of my pleasure reading, too. There's the rereading I do with my children (Charlotte's Web, as I've blogged about, and Richard Scarry, too). But there are also the books I come back to on my own, over and over. This time I find myself working through Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time at the incredibly slow pace of a couple of pages a month, reading a heavily and entertainingly annotated edition.

As Klinkenborg writes, rereading is something of a misnomer:

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

And that, of course, is the reason to reread. I am sometimes horrified to read something I once loved, only to discover I can't stand it, or I can't stand who I was that I loved it. Sometimes subsequent rereadings change the book. Wide Sargasso Sea forever shifted Jane Eyre for me, in ways that make Charlotte Bronte's book a richer experience. Villette changed Jane Eyre for me, too, and I continue to reread and love both of those books. (I'm actually also reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I just couldn't resist when I found a deeply discounted copy. I fear that book might have peaked with its opening sentence--"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."--but maybe I'll be lucky and love the whole thing. I'm not sure it will change Jane Austen for me, though.)

The other story that has been going around is Kanye West's dismissal of reading and books. I don't really want to engage with that other than to point you to Cake Wrecks' wonderful antidote: a series of pictures of book-related cakes, all of which pay tribute to the joys of reading and to the yumminess of cakes. (h/t bookn3rd via her tweet)

Happy reading to you all!