University of Nevada study: Books in the home

On a recent visit to my parents, my dad and I walked over to the public library. While he went in search of the titles on his list, I wandered to the nearest shelf and scanned the rows of books for a volume thin enough to be read in entirety while I waited. My fingers found Anna Quindlen's memoir How Reading Changed My Life. I settled into a rocking chair, and read it through. I found many lines poignant enough to jot down in Notes on my iPhone to be transferred to my Moleskine of quotes; the measure of a worthy read. One such line that has stuck with me:

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

I've written before on the indispensability of books in my living space, but always from the standpoint of aesthetics, and maybe comfort. But a new 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, a University of Nevada associate professor of sociology and resource economics, declares that books in a family's home in fact correlate with more and better schooling for children. Some key findings, via Nevada News:

• "Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level."
• "The difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education)."
• "Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit."

I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a bibliophilic family, with parents and aunts and uncles and cousins who love reading. My childhood home has bookshelves in multiple rooms stocked with volumes of every stripe, from beach-worthy creased paperbacks to a tired encyclopedia collection to a Shakespeare tome to dense non-fiction hardbacks whose very jacket descriptions are a mental strain. Visits to the library were regular, trips to the bookstore were standard. To this day one of the first questions I ask my dad, to catch up: "What are you reading?"

This study, entitled "Family scholarly culture and educational success", implies that my book-soaked environment would have been sufficient to fuel me for 17 years of academic success even if I weren't also so lucky as to have two college-educated parents whose intelligence motivated me to reach for the A. I would always wonder, "How do they know all these things?" whether it be how to flute a pie crust (okay, that was a recent one) or how to sew a button or what 'encomium' means or how airplanes fly. My parents are naturally smart, yes, but their affinity for reading was also a key factor in my awed perception of their intellect.

Edan Lepucki, blogger on The Millions, has the same notion of books-on-display connoting something meaningful about their owner:

"If a stranger came over to our apartment, and there weren’t books, or–oh no!–not enough books, what would that say about me and Patrick? If my copy of Handmaid’s Tale or his copy of The Power Broker weren’t on display, how would anyone understand us? Some people have a cross in their home, or a mezuzah on their doorjamb. I’ve got nine books by Vladimir Nabokov."

Evans's data are from 70,000 cases from 27 nations. Her conclusions are wide-reaching geographically, but also metaphorically in the examination of the current state of the book world. I don't imagine that the breadth of a parent's eReader library would have the same impact on a child as a visible, touchable 500-book library. I would have had no idea whether my parents were reading email, or browsing The New York Times, or scrolling through New Yorker cartoons, or reading a digital version of Paradise Lost.

The takeaway? Go buy a book. And put it on a shelf.

Corkboard

"Never before in the history of the known universe has there been so much information available to us humans. And never before has it been so difficult to process all the information we receive. Some consultant recently told me that the average American is bombarded with 4000 messages a day (fact-checkers, back me up on this.) Those of us who are informationalists—people who work with information professionally—must be assaulted more often. The toughest challenge, I find, is wading out of the cresting information river to experience media for frivolity’s sake or simply escaping the churning waters altogether for a few moments. If I manage to do either, it's usually after tending to the dishes in the kitchen late at night. Then I head to bed, look at that stack of books, feel a pang of guilt, and shut out the light. I do miss reading. Nowadays, we absorb."

-Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and Politics Daily columnist David Corn

Corkboard

"I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper. But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,' mushrooms don’t tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the 'Alice' for the iPad. I never have the lingering sense that there is another window open behind page 133 of 'the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.' I can tell the weather from these books only by the way their pages curl when it’s hot and humid.

And more. There is never a software glitch, like the one that keeps me from turning the page in ebrary. And there’s nothing meta about the metadata of real books. You can’t strip away details about the printing of the book — copyright information, place and date of publication — without actually tearing off the binding, title page, half-title and colophon. The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book often seems to be merely the text."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Some Thoughts About E-Reading"

Book trailers

I rarely watch TV commercials anymore, thanks to my DVR. I find previews more annoying than enticing in a movie theater. My mouse is primed to click CLOSE on online ads the moment they pop up. So you'd think, also given my resistance to vooks and blooks, I'd deride book trailers. But it's not that simple.

Troy Patterson, in a Slate article late last year, discussed several book trailers (like Jonathan Safran Foer's short web video for Eating Animals, below) and contended that "such clips can reveal the hopes and fantasies of readers, writers, and publishers alike".




Patterson criticizes the "Hollywood glamour" in some of these video projects that distracts from the literary merit of a given work, but in general takes a resignedly accepting stance towards the new media. I agree with his evaluation. I view book trailers as adapting to modern publishing, as the print ads of 2010- and whoever took issue with The New Yorker's sidebar promotion of new books, for example? In fact, many of the trailers, rapidly becoming stickier throughout publishing, are artistically sophisticated. One example is Jamieson Fry's piece for T.C. Boyle's The Women:



In a technological climate pushing physical books to the margins- The Millions cited in January that Laredo, Texas, population 250,000, is now literally bookstore-less- any effort to get books into readers' hands is commendable. Granted, book trailers can promote eBooks just as much as bound books, but for readers hesitant to convert to the Kindle just yet these marketing campaigns will fuel a purchase. Like Patterson, I think the trailers can be hokey, contrived, artificial. But so, too, can they be aesthetically pleasing, cinematically impressive, and, most importantly, commercially successful.

Corkboard

"When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it. When the mail arrives, I like to rip it open. Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

-Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

Here's blooking at you, kid

Yesterday's Paper Cuts post on Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer José Saramago's blog-turned-book poses an interesting question: can blogs become literature? Saramago's collection of blog posts, entitled "The Notebook", renders his online journal entries as essays. Yet in his review Gregory Cowles deems the vignettes "too topical and too fleeting to count as literature", albeit smartly and compellingly composed. For Cowles there is a marked difference between writing done in an Internet framework, and more traditional composition. Apparently Saramago agrees, because as Cowles notes, the author's last post reads,

“Until another day? I sincerely think not. I have begun another book and wish to dedicate all my time to it. You will see why, if it all goes well.”

I have to say I disagree with both men.

Saramagos' litblogging effort has antecedents; according to Wikipedia, "blooks" have existed for a number of years, a trend with enough traction to institute the Lulu Blooker Prize in 2005. Tucker Max, famed chronicler of drunken encounters, published New York Times bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in 2006, writing in a genre he calls "fratire". The book based on Julie Powell's cooking blog "The Julie/Julia Project" was made into the film Julie & Julia in 2009. Colby Buzzell, a U.S. Army machine-gunner who spent a year in Iraq, turned his 2004 blog into a captivating and acclaimed memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq.

The breadth of these examples suggests the wide range of possibilities for transforming blogs into respectable- or, at least, commercially successful- prose. A Business Week article titled "'Blooks' are in Bloom" quotes Eileen Gittins, CEO of online publisher Blurb.com,

"We believe there's a market [for book-publishing services] for every single blogger out there. Charles Dickens originally serialized his novels in magazines. We are seeing much the same thing happening today, with blogs."

The blogosphere is rife with well-written material, and writers that prioritize literary craft. The tempest of new media is all about breaking down walls, between interface and user, writer and reader, professional and layman, traditional publishing and cutting-edge; why can't we discard the boundary, too, between blogging and "real" writing? I'll concede that the extension of electronic writing into the formalized publishing realm has its limits: 19-year-old U Chicago undergrads Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin's recent book Twitterature, a compilation of reimagined classic works in 20-character-tweet form, makes me gag (the Huffington Post writes that it "kicked all that is sacred about the written word in its proverbial scrotum"). But Twitter, like the blogosphere, does house the literary-minded among the rabble. An informal GalleyCat poll at the end of last year found "1,790 novelists, 9,139 poets, 19,490 journalists, 28,529 authors, and a staggering 99,082 writers on Twitter."

Basically I respect the fact that Saramago and Cowles are pigeonholing blogging and publishable writing, because I share readers' and authors' fear that cultivated writing will perish without its own limelight. But I also think there's room for blogs- earnest, finely written, ones especially- to evolve off the screen in their own right, not as a replacement for traditional books. So, I'd answer Saramago's ultimate question, "Until another day?" with a frank "Yes."

Mark My Words

I'm a bookmark rotater. Every time I start a new book, I slip in a different page-saver. I think of reading as an experience: each book has its own feel, smell, appearance and thus merits its own bookmark.

I have stacks of them in various drawers throughout my apartment. Creased and folded thin paper ones from Borders, sturdy laminated ones from elementary school art class, glossy cardboard American Girl Dolls ones, elegantly artistic ones straight from the check-out line at Barnes & Noble, or some stamped with readerly quips ("Ssh! I'm reading"). Some of my bookmarks aren't bookmarks at all: Phillies tickets, a swatch of red-hearts-patterned stationery paper that caught my eye. If I start a book somewhere away from my stash, I'll use a PostIt or a receipt or even a tissue. But it's always different, a marker linked to that particular text. Of course I reuse my bookmarks- their recycling is what infuses them with that treasured lived-in quality- but from one reading to the next, each deserves a breather.

It's been a while since I bought a new bookmark, but not for lack of temptation. I love these from swissmiss:

Obviously the migration of reading to a digital platform eradicates bookmarks. Saving your place becomes automated, and dog-earing a random page becomes a computerized mimicry:

"On any content page, use the scroll wheel to select the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click the scroll wheel and you’ll see the small triangle now looks like it was folded down."

What about my Phillies tickets? What about those American Girl Dolls bookmarks I've saved for over a decade? What about the comfort and familiarity of seeing a book sitting on your nightstand with a marker sticking out as a symbol of those hard-earned pages gone by, and the reward that is the rest of those pages to come?

Computerized bookmarking in general is a useful tool: flagging websites for future reference, highlighting or recording a note in Word to track your reading progress. But electronically bookmarking for-pleasure reading is just one more depersonalization of the reading experience. I'll take the frustration of bookmarks slipping out into the bottom of my purse over scroll-wheel-clicking any day.

A thorn in the flesh?

The extent of my experience with video games: playing Crash Bandicoot and Jeopardy with my sister and friends on our PS2 in high school, plus a game or two of Rock Band at a frat house in college. Add to that many a couch-side observation of frantic, near-foaming male friends' tooth-and-nail battles on the faux-football field or -race car track, and that about does it.

But the recent trend of video game adapatation of literature may force me to acquaint myself more familiarly with the console. This past November, MediaBistro blog GalleyCat cited the B&H Publishing Group's creation of Bible Navigator X, a Bible Reader for Xbox 360. Yes, you read that right. According to Aaron Linne, B&H Publishing Group's executive producer of digital marketing:

"The Xbox isn't just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a controller in their hands than a book."

The application is available for $5 or 400 Microsoft Points, the currency of the Xbox Live marketplace. Bible Reader users can search, bookmark and adjust settings for big screen readings or customized reading themes.

My initial reaction was skepticism at the sacriligious undertones of manipulating the Bible with technology normally reserved for gory car theft games and virtual wrestling matches. But, really, how different is this venture from the Kindle's digitization of texts, or "cellphone novels" written with and read on mobile phones? (Among best selling novels of the last 3 years, 4 of the top 10 novels in Japan were written with cellphones, like the entire bookcase's contents below.)

The video game lit genre is here to stay: Electronic Arts and Random House recently teamed to release a video game version of Dante's Inferno, in which players can explore the circles of hell interactively in addition to on the page. Much like the vook, these video games meld literary quality and enhanced new media features with the aim of providing a rich, multi-faceted experience of a text. But unlike the vook, games allow readers to physically participate, justifying the hijacking of literature as raw material. Furthermore, the games aren't trying to edge out books from the publishing world, but rather supplement them.

Here's my video game aficionado friend Billy on yet another benefit of video game adapation of books:

"Ask a middle schooler or high-schooler if they remember anything about The Crucible, The Things They Carried, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, etc, and they won't be able to recount it with either the vividness or enthusiasm they'll be able to tell the story of Link and the Triforce (Legend of Zelda), the moment Sephiroth killed Aeris in front of Cloud (Final Fantasy 7), minute details about the T-Virus (Resident Evil), etc etc. All of these have intricate plots with the same kind of research, details, development, and copious amounts of dialogue one expects from either a book or movie. But you are far more invested."

Just as with every other new age form of literature I've addressed, these intellectualized video games will never replace tangible paperbacks for me. But I'm willing to cede their beneficially immersive treatment of text. I'll consider them less a thorn in the flesh of the publishing industry, and more an aggravatingly itchy tag in the back of my shirt.

Tweeter: the generational reading gap

A few months ago at the gym I was reading Anna Karenina on the stationary bike. Not your typical recreational reading, I suppose- which prompted the elderly gentleman pedaling next to me to strike up a conversation. It turned out he was a classic lit lover himself, a retired Political Science professor craving intellectual stimulation. We talked books for 45 minutes and exchanged email addresses.

Since then we've had more literary conversations- both in person and electronically- which are mutually satisfying in their symbiosis of two bookworms, but also in their enlightenment regarding today's reading habits. He finds it fascinating that any Millennials ("Your generation only knows ten words"), subscribers to technology like Facebook and "Tweeter", would invest time in the world's literary canon. I, in turn, find it a fresh surprise to be able to connect on an even plane with a generational superior. Our tech-driven society is over the speed limit in the fast lane, Internet axons firing like fireworks to connect people, but when we readers really slow down, embrace traditional media, and make room in our brains and our lives for quality literary material, that's when the real engagement can begin.

Some statistics are hopeful: in a post entitled "Good News About The Future of Reading," GalleyCat cited a New York Magazine survey of 100 Manhattanites in which only 10% of interviewees hadn't bought books in the last year. And that doesn't mean that that 10% didn't read any. But The Guardian's Books Blog notes how "time for serious reading appears to be getting more and more pinched" as entertainment media enacts "the very theft of our thinking space". The word "reading" itself has shifted in meaning, from connoting a dedicated task to, now, a scattershot experience as our eyeballs flick from one piece of text to another.

Conversing with the old professor has made the value of true reading resonate with me even more in the context of my generation's loosening grip on traditionally published material. Operating in a workplace devoted to shifting text from print to digital has also heightened my appreciation for this old media. I blog, I have Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, God knows I email. But I also check books out from the library, get Barnes&Noble gift cards as birthday presents, and read print magazines.

I've grown up around reading- my mom used to read to me after tucking me into bed, our living room has always had stocked shelves, my dad's home office is a veritable library. So perhaps the contrast between my generation's reading habits and those of my elders is even more poignant for me, my job and personal inclination toward reading aside. In any case, I think society's efforts toward digital conversion, often focused on seniors' acclimation to computers and the Internet, should be focused at least as energetically on print conversion for my age bracket, encouraging adherence to quality reading. I've said it before, but: what a novel idea.

To reread or not to reread?

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
-Robertson Davies

One difference between literature and film, for consumers, is the concept of revisiting. Most often we only buy a movie (unless it's a gift for someone) if we are likely to view it more than once. Otherwise, thanks to 21st century technology we can resort easily and cost-efficiently to rental services like Netflix, Blockbuster and iTunes. I bought Slumdog Millionaire because it was an Oscar-winner, and because the first time I saw it I was concentrating on reading the subtitles. I bought Knocked Up because I love Seth Rogen, and who doesn't sometimes need a dose of humor therapy?

Conversely, many readers purchase rather than borrow, regardless. Libraries don't have the same glitz as video stores and movie-rental websites, and they don't deliver to your mailbox. There are book rental services like BooksFree.com, but the prices are higher and the selection is more sparse than with movie outfits. From my perspective, the prospect of one day building a chestnut-walled, rolling-ladder-equipped study lined with abundantly stocked bookshelves is motivation enough to spend my Barnes & Noble gift certificates solely on books rather than the “buy one DVD, get one half-off” sale, and to hold onto all my college coursebooks, which after four years range from Thomas Paine pamphlets to doorstop science textbooks (one-time harbingers of my medical career) to the entire Jane Austen collection to the Oxford History of Western Art to Susan Sontag essay collections to translated Greek tragedies.

Needless to say, even when I add a book to my ever-flowering collection, I don’t necessarily intend to reread it. Sometimes it's the New York Times bestseller I didn't want to wait on the library queue for, or the classic I imagined with my name penciled in its cover, even knowing I'd devote only one read-through to it. In his 1922 article "The Buying of Books" in The Atlantic, Carl S. Patton writes,

"I have always felt that one should buy as many books as possible. They are not like food, of which one should buy only as much as one can consume at the moment. Nor like clothes, of which a wise man will buy as few and as cheap as he can get by with. But of books he should buy all he can."

On a similar note, Patrick Kurp records the last stanza of Timothy Steele's poem "The Library" and writes on his blog Anecdotal Evidence, "

'Winding, as though along a corkscrew's thread,
A squirrel has circled down a sycamore.
The frail must, in fair times, collect and store,
And so, amid swirled papery debris,
The squirrel creeps, nosing round, compelled to hoard
By instinct, habit, and necessity.'

Like the squirrel, we hoard – acorns, books."

Then what does make a book, plucked from its crowded neighborhood, re-readable? What books do we return to, how often, and why?

Off the top of my head, I can count on one hand books that I have read more than once outside the classroom, excluding children's picture books or poetry/nursery rhyme collections. Here’s a list of these five:

-Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
-The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
-The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
-Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
-Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

It seems these five have a commonality: authenticating the existence of true literary craft across times and places. A reread of each book always revealed to me something fresh, both internally to the material and externally. It's inspiring to be reminded of the power of hand-to-heart writing, especially amid some of the dreariness of modern life. But it takes a lot longer on average to read a book than to watch a movie. And I keep lists that span pages and pages sorting gads of books I hope to have time to read: one on my iPhone, several in each of the Moleskines I keep in my bags, one on my computer, one in a Google doc. One exists in the animate form of my mother, whose book recommendations culled from her book group and reader friends have proven trusty. So what made it seem worthwhile to go back, to thumb through the pages of these books and make the conscious decision to turn anew to their Page One?

Each of the five is a transporting piece, one that sends the reader soaring into an elsewhere, be it historical or fantastical. But doesn’t all literature serve this purpose of escape, if not quite as manifestly as the lattermost three on the list? If we reread only to savor that fade-out of reality, we might as well read a new book altogether, for an even more salient travel experience.

Perhaps each of the works also harbors several layers of significance, bringing fresh fodder for thought to each reading depending on age and circumstances, just as Robertson Davies attests to above. I might not have picked up on Swift’s deeply satirical and allegorical commentary on British and French enmity if I hadn’t yet been exposed to the historical background. I might not, the first or second time around, have really felt a profound appreciation for the masterful artworks in Tracy Chevalier’s diamond of a novel without the art history courses in whose vast riches of knowledge I’ve now been steeped for the past few years. On the books blog "The Millions", Samantha Peale writes in a post on her year in reading,

"The novels I reread over the years take on different meanings, they change and deepen, my favorite sections shift. Sometimes a book that once held great meaning doesn’t quite reach me anymore and instead I’m reminded of other stories, themes or styles that are of more present interest. "

What about, on a related note, books we read at too young an age to understand at all? In my 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I've checked off every one I've "read" cover to cover. Some I've actually mined the depths of- writing essays, holding discussions, scribbling margin notes, sharing passages with friends or family, just ruminating on my own time- like Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Beloved. But some I read nominally, like for a high school class or just to be able to cross it off the list, before I grew into a fundamental love of literature: The Sun Also Rises, Brave New World, As You Like It, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have at best a hazy memory of books like these. Rereading prose that falls into this category would actually be like an inaugural reading, rather than like wiggling fingers into a familiarly soft old glove.

Or what about books we read at a young age whose comfort we return to for that very fact? Blogging on "Lit Drift", Toby Shuster ruminates on the advantages and disadvantages of rereading childhood literary classics like Little House on the Prairie, but ultimately concludes,

"The fond memories I have of the Little House book remain, no matter how maligned. And maybe Wilder’s simplistic narration of an era so far removed allows us to better comprehend the monotony in our own day-to-day routines. Because sitting in a cubicle isn’t nearly as arduous as churning butter."

Whatever the reason, whatever the effect, I like the fact that this issue is one free of influence from the digitization of publishing, other than maybe the ease of obtaining books to be reread. For now, without a firm grasp on the mental process behind rereading great books, I’ll stick to DVRing movies and saving enough money to build those wraparound bookshelves that sparkle somewhere. And, after all, when it comes down to it,

"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."