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Shop nowWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Books
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“ What We Talk About When We Talk About Books healed some real cracks in my relationship with reading, and reinforced my love and optimism for the written word. Book historian Leah Price guides you through all the myths, melodrama, and baggage modern culture is carrying around about books. Through a humorous and curiosity-filled tour of book history, she unpacks why so many of us feel so much pressure to read the right things in the right way, and why we've come to feel like doing so would whip our brains into shape and make us into zen, hyper-focused superhumans. Price's measured take on things made me feel like it's all going to be okay. Elisabeth Rodgers' cool, clear voice was the perfect narration.”
— Tova • Busboys and Poets Books
Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.
Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020
Leah Price has taught English at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University, where from fall 2019 onward she will be founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative. She is the author How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and the editor of Unpacking My Library.
Reviews
"Price's book-unlike other examples of what she calls 'autobibliography'-is funny and hopeful, rather than dour and pious...What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is an enjoyable tour, full of surprising byways into historical arcana."—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "[Price] is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia...Her radiant descriptions of the physical properties of books, the forensic traces-from smudges to candle wax-of earlier bodies holding them, immediately sent me to the Internet..."—Dan Chiasson, New Yorker "A witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature."—Wall Street JournalWant the printed book?
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