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
You Are What You Read
Two new studies reaffirm what good readers (and Quixote and Pechorin) have long known—when you identify with a fictional characters, you are likely to subconsciously emulate them.
Quaker Was Better
Most of the time, when somebody insults a writer on Twitter, the insult disappears into the cyberspace ether. However, as with any rule, there are always exceptions, and one is when you trash Joyce Carol Oates and then thank her for inventing a breakfast food.
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The Poem Heard Round the World
“It’s really strange to have the success of a poem be so directly tied to people processing grief. It’s a strange thing, because it’s a blessing and a curse.” The Rumpus interviews poet Maggie Smith about her new collection, Good Bones, her viral poem that shares its name, and her craft. From our archives: Smith’s collection was featured in our round-up of October’s Must-Read Poetry.
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The Persistence of Memory
“How can we trust ourselves? Trust that our skills will return? Trust that this blank document—this one, right now—won’t be our undoing? The previous essay I wrote won’t save me when the blank document stares, and the deadline looms, and the editor lurks, and the readers wait.” Mensah Demary on writing and forgetting.
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Watching Olive Kitteridge
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed readers to the trailer for Olive Kitteridge, the new HBO show based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Year in Reading alum Elizabeth Strout. In this week’s New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum sizes up the new series, describing it as a case study in bringing a work of fiction to the screen. “In the course of four hours, the miniseries casts a West Coast spell on scenes of Yankee repression,” she writes.
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Change
The New York Review of Books excerpts recent Nobel winner Mo Yan’s part fiction, part memoir Change.
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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.