Have the anxieties of our time inspired us to find comfort in a fictional idea of what reading used to be? Are we living in an unprecedented new era, marking the end to a golden age of reading? In her introduction to What We Talk About When We Talk Novels, Leah Price argues that these digital-age questions about the printed word are not new and the golden age of reading was never what digital-age writers conceive. Making comparisons of current concerns with each historical reinvention of the book, she argues that “our own era continues rather than breaks with, a tradition of innovation that has seen new formats emerge over and over again for half a millennium.” (4)
Exploring the golden age of print from the “rise of mass audiences in the eighteenth century to the Cold War-era triumph of the paperback”, she identifies and counters three fundamental myths. The “myth of exceptionalism”, our twenty-first-reader sense that we are experiencing unprecedented change; the “myth of the ideal reader”, or equating reading with virtue; finally she lists the “myth of the self-made reader”, or the idea of an “unmediated communion between a reader’s mind and the author”, which “erases all the third parties who sell books, lend books, catalog books, give or withhold them.” This idea also erases how important and inevitable the community that connects other readers is.
One of the central arguments in the essay is that reading a book as a solitary immersive experience may have never existed in the way that is commonly assumed in the digital age. Yet the image of peacefully curling up in a comfortable chair with a good book, is pervasive in our culture ,beyond the academic conversation. Still I am not able to conceive of reading as a solitary experience, and I have not yet sensed a great difference between reading a printed book or a tablet or computer screen. This statement is always met with some level of horror, but I still enjoy both equally and I have never longed for one or the other. What has always mattered the most to me was the community of others reading the same words, but seeing and experiencing something different.
As a child, I would immerse myself in a novel, often completely focused on the conversations that would follow. I wondered what landscapes and faces looked and smelled like to other readers, and I impatiently waited for my friends to finish the book so we could finally argue about the female protagonists. This were the last years of communist Albania, but many books were still forbidden. My older cousins secretly shared books, and sometimes handwritten stories, whose darkened corners and falling edges were covered in handwritten notes.
It was one of my greatest aspirations to be part of their group. The thrill of peeking into a forbidden world proved irresistible and I read many novels that I was not ready for, and academic texts that I did not understand. I am still traumatized by The Stranger and just about everything that happens The House of Spirits.
I was reminded of this when Leah Price looks at the tension between print and handwriting. Handwriting lasted up to late 18th century in Europe, and its ability to avoid censure, in a way print cold not, allowed for radical writers and thinkers to publish their ideas. The same way reading forbidden literature worked in a communist country, this fostered a feeling of community and “forged a collective through the act of forwarding or exchanging ideas.” In many ways she argues this is similar to Twitter or blogging. I agree.
