Turning the Page
What greater joy is there in travelling to distant places than browsing in bookstores, and then filling every available space in your hand luggage with the delightful tomes. The handbag bulges with paperbacks, the pockets of your computer bag has books. You are not a suspect of any kind when you stand in a queue […]
What greater joy is there in travelling to distant places than browsing in bookstores, and then filling every available space in your hand luggage with the delightful tomes. The handbag bulges with paperbacks, the pockets of your computer bag has books. You are not a suspect of any kind when you stand in a queue at airports reading, with another book under your arm. Books are a rare commodity when you live in a town where every stationery store is called a ‘Bookshop’ and where the real bookshops are filled with secondary-school textbooks, and where ‘reading’ means studying with exams in view. The Bend-Down booksellers (pavement sellers) sometimes have unexpected treasures, brown and dog-eared but an unmistakable collection of short stories by Eudora Welty, a James Baldwin novel, or a V.S Naipaul falling apart in the middle.
Reading a novel, someone said is like having a relationship, while the short story is a one-night-stand. And that reinforces the importance of books again. Books that you can touch and feel, tangible books, aesthetically designed, with blurbs on the back. Books that come to life and grow on you, ticking off and triggering things in your brain as you read, leaving you savoring the words and ideas long after you have finished the book. Some people turn the corner of the page inwards if they break off while reading a book and need to come back to the page again. I value my books far too much to treat them that way. I cut up wedding invitations, church launching invitations and other such and make them into book marks which I leave lying around the house. Every book in every room has a bookmark sticking out of it. A bookmark is a work of art and can even be a collector’s item. A friend of mine who values books as I do, always puts a newspaper cover on the books she borrows to read. That way the books are returned, well-read but with minimal damage.
Virtual books. Like everything virtual, to me they don’t exist. Or like the virtual office and virtual laboratory, they come and go with the flick of a button or keyboard and exist in cyberspace somewhere. They are not the books I lovingly handle, turn the page, scribble on the margins, highlight, underline, spill coffee over, and generally interact with. A book is a living, breathing thing, full of vitality. Even on the bookshelf books speak to you. In Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, the Ancients and Moderns are engaged in a spirited conversation. My Study is a hallowed space where in hushed grandeur, the bookshelves line the walls from floor to ceiling. Each book has my name or my husband’s name on it and the circumstances of its coming into being on our shelves. Date and place purchased. Gifted by my daughters/sons. A birthday/ anniversary present. Behind each inscription are layers of history – the first and subsequent experiences of reading that book. Student days when we read into the night, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Nietzsche’s Of Good and Evil, and Rousseau’s Confessions. There are books you read for ideas and others that you read to enjoy the use of language in the text. You luxuriate in the words and expressions, the exquisite style, as in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera. My husband has a book he takes unfailingly on all his journeys. It has travelled to Capetown, Las Vegas, Manchester, and Rio de Janeiro. It is Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and her Two Husbands. He refuses to finish it because it is an experience of a lifetime, savoured slowly like a favourite meal, read and digested. And re-read on every journey. Some books like Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda take a hundred pages to warm up for a satisfying read. The remaining 250 pages are unputdownable.
Some books sit on your bookshelf for years because their time has not come yet. Everyone in my home had read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and recommended it to me. But I left it there while Knut Hamsun, and Martin Amis, and Umberto Eco pushed and shoved and begged to be read. I was awestruck when I finally read that the author, Toole had committed suicide in frustration when his manuscript had been repeatedly turned down by publishers. Some years after his death, his mother sent the manuscript to a Creative Writing professor, the work was published and went on to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction! It is an amazing first and only novel by the author.
The Classics have a special place on my shelves, on the upper reaches. You have to stand on a chair to get to them. May be even bow to them before you bring one down in reverence and start to re-read it. I have no Dewey decimal system of classification. I bung the titles together as feminists or as radicals, or simply as imaginary friends in my Study. Virginia Woolf jostles for space alongside J.D Salinger and Gustav Flaubert. Helon Habila keeps company with Iris Murdoch, and Flora Nwapa with Michael Ondaatje. The more confused the arrangement, the more time I spend in the company of authors. There are books in every room, cook books on the kitchen shelf, devotional and inspirational books on the coffee table, and books on astronomy and Renewable Energy (my husband’s passions) all over the place. My special books take a place on a shelf above the bed. They guard over me as I guard them from being pilfered by the casual reader.
My children were raised on a nourishing diet of good books. Books that fired their imagination, fantasies, and fun books. I read to my children when they were infants. They loved the colour, the sounds, the quirky illustrations. As toddlers they accompanied me to the bookstore and we all browsed and selected the books to buy. They learnt to turn the pages of books before they could successfully take a spoon to their mouths. Their birthday presents were books first, before chocolates were added to the parcel.
We are made to understand that 25 percent of all books read in 2 to 5 years to come will be of the e-kind. Horror of horrors! An e-book and an electronic or battery-operated e-Reader will replace the real thing! An e-book is the electronic version of a printed book. It can be read on your laptop or desktop or on a device designed for the purpose. Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook are reading devices available in the market at the moment. John Grisham, the author of bestsellers categorically refused the e-version of his books but has ultimately given in to digital pressure. J.K Rowland, the author of the Harry Potter series does not want her books in e-form. With the e-book, we will no longer be able to smell the paper (a new book), touch it and take pleasure in turning the pages. But everything will be virtually done for us. We will download these digital horrors on to our e-Readers (plastic iPads, Kindle and what nots) and read them on the screen. There is even a print-on-demand technology waiting for the command to drop a newly minted book on to our laps.
The expression is to ‘curl up’ on the couch with a book. How do you curl up anywhere with a plastic reading device? And can you read a tacky e-book in bed? You might drop it and smash the damn thing and run up expenses for yourself. How do you gift an e-book? A child cannot rip open the parcel in anticipation and hastily turn the pages of a book. It would have to be accompanied by an e-Reader which would have to be switched on and activated before the title of the book is known. An e-book is non-existent without an e-Reader. I walk into Barnes and Noble or Borders and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee reaches me as I browse the shelves. The bookstore is cheerful and well lit. There are comfortable nooks and corners where you can rest your coffee and sit down to read, on your own or with a friend. You are not compelled to buy but you ‘experience’ books in their natural terrain. In the digital age, bookshops are required to reinvent themselves. They are in danger of becoming irrelevant. They offer free internet access and facilitate the downloading of e-books. They host Book Clubs, organize readings by authors, and even offer creative writing classes and summer camps for children. They also sell jewellery, cards, music, and educational toys.
In the digital age it is going to be cheaper and easier for authors to self publish e-books. Publishing Houses will continue to seek out established authors but the self-published e-book will find its place and level in the market. If it receives favourable reviews, it will be available for purchase alongside the established authors on Amazon.com. E-publishing opens up the market for emerging writers who need a platform to display their talents.
As the media examines the boon and the bane of e-reading culture, the world of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley seem like prophecies realized. An e-Reader we are told can contain thousands of books depending on the capacity of its memory. Schoolchildren need no longer be weighed down by backpacks bulging with several bulky textbooks. One smart e-Reader can take all their e-texts. Books take up space in the home or the office, they cost money to be shipped across the world in crates and boxes. E-books are electronically transmitted and downloaded. An e-book can be read in total darkness as the screen lights up on the e-Reader, providing the font, the size, and the colour and contrast required. An e-book can never go out of print. It is cheap and some are even free, as many of the older books from previous centuries will be available in the public domain. Looked at from the environmental point of view, we no longer need to cut down all those trees for the sake of paper. But are e-books real books? What of the batteries, and the technological junk that we will accumulate in the case of e-books? Do we fling them into cyberspace?
It is not going to be an easy transition for many of us. I subscribe to the old coexisting with the new. I wish to hoard my books and derive pleasure from holding a paper-book and turning its pages. There is room for the radio alongside the visual media which has taken over news reporting. In the Third World we listen to the radio as we sip the morning coffee. Our children need to see, handle, and love the feel of books in order for us to develop a reading culture. The mobile phone and the text-culture has ruined the use of the English language and created a technology-speak which only the young understand. We need to save them from the brink of illiteracy altogether. It will be a very long time before e-book technology is widely available in our rural and urban areas and is dependable. Let us not be in a hurry to acquire the latest gadgets before the reading habit is established in our societies.