Lev Grossman discusses inheritable libraries, the similarities between print books and wifi, and the pleasures of the codex in this video.
All the things that are in me are in you
To Train Up a Child
The self-proclaimed Christian parenting book, To Train Up a Child, has come under fire in the wake of the three child deaths. Critics started an online petition asking Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to stop selling the book; over 9,000 people have signed it.
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Famous in India
“His writings rarely make it to the US, and are resolutely for an Indian readership. They will win no prizes nor inspire dissertations. But for these reasons they represent the actuality of what many people in the world are reading today, outside of the newly sanctified category of the ‘global novel.’” Ulka Anjaria for Public Books on Chetan Bhagat, “possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever” and largely unheard of in the west. For more fictional Desi perspectives, read Aditya Desai in our own pages on reading narratives of Indian women.
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Poor Options for Refusal
For most people, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is the beginning and end of mafia books, the sole notable entry in a sparse and little-known genre. That’s why it’s helpful that Roberto Dainotto, in The Guardian, published this list, which includes The Godfather, Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels, and Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers, among other picks.
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Blood Roots
“[W]e are and we are not who our blood roots predetermine us to be.” Over at Electric Literature, Sion Dayson talks with our own Sonya Chung about race, writing, and her new novel, The Loved Ones, which is one of the books we’re most excited to read this month.
Adults These Days
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 75% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read at least one print book in the past year. The same can be said for only 64% of Americans aged 30 and older.
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A Weary, Frumpy Civil Servant
J.K. Rowling’s new play will not, as everyone had imagined, be a prequel to the Harry Potter series. Instead, it will be a sequel, with the main action taking place 19 years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and focusing on Harry’s youngest son, Albus Severus. Here’s a self described “jaded, contrarian” take on Rowling and the series as a whole from The Millions.
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The thing is, I have a large physical library, as well as an ereader, but I still get the majority of my books from the library, which I “lose” once I return them. It is no longer part of my codex, except as part of my Goodreads list. But libraries, which have been around for ages, have not encountered this kind of backlash, even though they present the PRECISE same problem as Lev Grossman would see it.
First off: I am very sympathetic to Grossman’s larger point: the phenomenological and epistemological significance of the shift from scroll to codex. Essentially, Grossman give a lazy gloss of Roger Chartier’s history of the book. For those who are interested, pick up one of Chartier’s shorter volumes translated into English. “The Order of Books” and “Forms and Meanings” are good places to start.
THAT SAID: when it comes to reading the novel, Grossman gets his history laughably wrong.
What was the first novel? That question is vigorously debated by literary historians, but there are two general camps. The first camps say that the vulgar (i.e. Romance language, not Latin) chivalrous romances are the first novels (Amadis de Gaula, for example). Other say the first modern novel is Cervantes’ Don Quijote. Either way, we are talking about post-print, post-Gutenberg narratives.
The novel required two things in order to come into being: 1) mass distribution of texts; 2) mass literacy. In order to have novels, people needed to be able to get their hands on the books and be able to read them. Both mass literacy and mass distribution of texts are post-Gutenberg phenomena in Europe. Before the widespread availability of printed material, there was no need for literacy beyond the Church and the Court. After all, what is the point of learning to read if the only reading material is kept hidden away in the local monastery under lock and key? It is only AFTER Gutenberg’s technological innovation that something like a “reading public” even come into existence.
Furthermore, the novel form as we know it was not perfected in the codex medium. The great European novels of the nineteenth century were in fact serialized, i.e. published in installments–like comic books today–in newspapers. I repeat: newspapers, not codex. Charles Dickens is only the most popular and well-known example.
All this to say: the shift from codex to e-reader is indeed significant, but any attempt to connect the codex to the novel is historically misinformed. Grossman needs to get his history straight.