Reading Books

In the episode of Seinfeld known as "The Bizarro Jerry," where Elaine meets Kevin and his friends Gene, Feldman, and Vargas, bizarro counterparts to Jerry, George, Kramer, and Newman, Elaine comments on the differences between them and the Seinfeld bunch by noting that they read. Jerry replies, "I read," and Elaine counters, "books, Jerry, they read books."

Clearly there is something different in reading books. While illiteracy still exists, and functional illiteracy is even more common, most modern humans can and do read, and many continue to read books. Of course, some of us would want to quibble about the kinds of books they are reading, and some of us might even want to exclude comic books and graphic novels from the book category, but books are, at least for the moment, holding their own.

But exactly what do we mean by books, I wonder? Is it just the physical, material object we're talking about? The codex? Before we started slicing them up into pages bound together into codices, sometime between the first and fourth centuries, "books" were written down on scrolls. And before that what were they written on? Were they written down at all, or were they memorized and passed around as oral literature? And what about clay tablets? What were they for? They weren't books, but they recorded writing that could be read. Which brings us back to reading and books.

There are lots of different kinds of reading. We have to read signs for information and direction. All day long we're reading instructions, memos, menus, newspapers, magazines, blogs. We're reading on screens, paper, posters, sign boards electronic and analog. We're reading language, symbols, graphical representations, etc. We're in a culture based on reading, even reading gesture and body language. But what does all that have to do with reading books?

Many of us, most of us, when asked what we've been reading don't respond, "I just read a really great billboard on the bus this morning." At least, I don't think we would. We generally assume that we're being asked what books we've been reading. And in any case, that's the notion behind the Seinfeld joke. Sure, everyone reads, but some of us actually read books. And for many of us that's really the only reading that counts as reading.

And so again I wonder, what do we mean by books? Until recently, and for the last several hundred years, books were books. Codices. They came in various sizes, but were fairly standard in construction and function: pages bound together with thread or glue. Books can be hand made or machine made, they can be writing or pictures, language, symbols, drawings, graphics, tables, numbers, photographs, etc. We've all seen them. Most of us own some. Some of us own thousands of them. They're everywhere. You can buy them at bookstores or online or even at Wal-Mart. Those objects are books.

Thought of in that way, books are not content but a delivery mechanism. But if someone were to ask us how many books we've read, what would we count? Would we include all those picture books and catalogues? How about that long book that came with your DVD recorder or your new HD TV? In this case we generally mean how many works of literature or history or philosophy or some such thing. We mean those longer pieces of writing, more than a few pages, that require a little time to get through. Books are longer than single stories or poems or essays or articles or sketches, etc. Of course, shorter pieces can be stitched together to make a book.

But then are these "books" we've read only books when they are books, pages bound together by thread or glue? I read two of Willa Cather's novels on the wonderful Willa Cather Archive on my computer screen. Are those still books? Do they count? This gets at another question that bothers some of us. Will books still be books when there are no more books? Not that I think that's likely to happen any time soon. Books are a great technology, and their replacement is still a ways off, but we can see it coming even in the so far relatively primitive examples of Amazon's Kindle or Sony's Reader.

Are books on the screen books? At first this seems like a silly question, but is it? This gets back to the issue of reading and reading books. Are books the things, the material objects, the delivery mechanism, or or they the stuff inside? Does the delivery mechanism affect the stuff? I suspect it does, to some extent. But this will require thinking more about the early history of books. Before books were printed, they were written out by hand. That limited the contents in certain ways to what you could do by hand, generally with pen and ink. With the invention of printing, whether with type or blocks of wood, the contents of books could evolve. With further advances, photographic reproduction, even more variety of content became possible. We've already allowed that books are a lot more than just text and language. So clearly the medium can affect the message: thank you Mr. McLuhan.

So books on the screen are not the same as books on the page. In some technical sense, they're not even books anymore. Now let me take one of my favorite examples of the evolution of a book: Homer's Iliad. Without going too deeply into the scholarly debates about the origins of this particular work of literature, we can probably get away with assuming that it had its origins in an oral culture rather than a written culture. We don't know who this guy Homer was, or if he even existed, but for the sake of argument let's say someone very like Homer eventually composed the poem that has come down to us as The Iliad. At some point the story, along with the setting, characters, language, was written down. Now it's a book right? Well, it was probably a scroll, or many scrolls, written out by hand, by many scribes and editors. But it was also, as we know from the Greeks, still recited aloud by rapsodes who had memorized the poem and performed it for audiences large and small. Eventually, it was written down on pages bound into codices. And many hundreds of years later it was printed in books. Now it's also online in a variety of forms. Check Perseus Digital Library for results.

The Iliad is a wonderful work of literature, an epic poem, a great book. I think everyone should read it because it gives us insight into what it is to be human. It endures because it shows us who and what we are, and it's about our favorite subjects, love and death, especially killing each other in some rather horrible ways. When I think about reading books, The Iliad is what I have in mind. And I don't actually care what the delivery mechanism is, even a sheet of flexible plastic with shimmering words forming and reforming on the page.