Why I Will Always Read Real Books

The overwhelming barrage of advertisements heralding the latest LCD touchscreens, “apps,” wi-fi capability, and new lightweight, slim-line designs of e-readers makes me want to run screaming into a library, hurl myself into the stacks, and grab as many old, smelly books with dog-eared and yellow pages as I can, clutching them to my chest and saving them from a fate worse than ketchup stains combined with overdue stamps.

Will we see a day when books are exhibited alongside dinosaur bones and ancient suits of armor? Will the steady companions of my childhood be curated as simple relics of the past, the aged paper fossils of times that exist only in memory? I fear that in my lifetime, there will come a day when I can no longer browse the aisles of a Barnes and Noble and finger the pages of a brand-new book – smell the ink and paper, caress the dust jacket and its smoothness. 

Ironically, scads of today’s popular fiction are comprised of post-Apocalyptic, futurist nightmares in which Big Brother is really watching us, and our basic human rights are stripped away by the emotionless products of ‘humanity’ living in technologically-advanced society.  Certainly, imagining the executives at Amazon laughing maniacally behind the latest version of the Kindle Fire as they plot world domination is a stretch; however, imagining the next great novel that I want to read (or write) being reduced to the single click of ‘download’ or  ‘delete’ is a sobering thought.

When I was in graduate school, I researched “place” and reader-character interaction as part of a Southern literature seminar I conducted on Thulani Davis’s novel, 1959. Essentially, this novel could be considered the African-American version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” only with more serious and widespread overtones about the birth of the Civil Rights era. My argument is that Davis uses a carefully-constructed “place” in her novel, using the fiction formula that served William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, along with Harper Lee: a town, or place, that is believable as such, in fiction, creates a significant emotional response in the reader’s interpretation of the text and connection to its characters. The interplay between character, reader, and place, then, construct a reading of a novel that can best be described as experiential. 

But I digress – my point here is that in my research, I read a book by J.A. Appleyard titled Becoming a Reader. In this classic text that studies the relationship between a reader and what S/he is reading, Appleyard thoroughly examines the psychological development that readers experience as they become more intellectually, emotionally, and physically involved in the process. I liken the progression through these stages (ultimately toward active reading) to the common experience we have when listening to music: whatever we are experiencing in our lives at the moment we first heard "Welcome to the Jungle" is the memory and feeling we forever attach to that song, even if only subconsciously. It is because we are interacting with the music in the same way we interact with a text - we are feeling it, thinking about it, responding to it (even if involuntarily so), and allowing it to become a part of our intellectual and emotional landscape. Therefore, this is why I remember being squished to near-death underneath a purple bean bag chair in the basement of a childhood friend's home when he and some of our school friends thought it would be a great idea to smother me. Every time I hear "Welcome to the Jungle," I recall the sticky bounces and clucks of evil glee as pre-teen boys pounded the bean bag harder and harder into my tear-stained face. That was not my idea of a fun birthday party.

Simply put, readers attach emotions to books. We take as much to the text as we take from it, imbuing it with the minutia of our daily lives, the scents of our kitchens, the tremble in our nervous fingers, the heartbeat of the little league double-header, and the crackly scarlet sunburn we brought home from vacation. Books are as much a part of our experience as we are a part of the experience in the book: I was recovering from a botched Caesarean-section in the hospital while Harry Potter and Ron Weasley were camping in the woods for several hundred pages in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. All of us were scared, miserable, and feeling alone in an uncertain world that had changed dramatically from the world we knew and navigated with ease. 

Who's not to say that we can develop relationships with e-readers? I'm sure we can. After all, one of the next books on my list to review is Sleeping with Your Smartphone. But the palpable, tangible act of turning a page and the joy of inhaling a book's delicious scent, old or new, cannot be replaced by any touchscreen or "app." 

The sacred private space in which we interact with books, despite our tastes in genre, is a holy place. It is a real, human experience that involves all of our senses and various levels of our ability to think, reason, and feel. Reading a book, a real, honest-to-God book, is so much more than learning about the wives of Henry VIII or getting lost in Middle Earth with hairy-footed Hobbits. Reading a real book is as meaningful as touching a wet turtle shell for the first time, having that first sip of eggnog on grandma's back porch while watching the snow fall, or unexpectedly holding hands with someone who makes your heart flutter before you decided if you were ready to hold hands or not. 

When we read a book, we live a book, both with it and inside it. Technology does not create warm, fuzzy feelings (unless the batteries get hot). Digital thumbprints do not carry memories and smells, or even germs. The mystery of who might have read a book before us and the voyeuristic fun we have when we try to decipher tiny marginal notes or, even better, find a bookmark or scrap of paper inside a used book, cannot be replicated on an e-reader. E-readers do not engage our senses or emotions as deeply, and change the act of reading so that it is no longer an intimate exchange. Real books do. I speculate that the humanity in that experience is merely incidental.