What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

By Leah Price
Unabridged
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“No one writes about books—and their bookness—with anything close to the daunting curiosity and dazzling acuity of the inimitable Leah Price. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is a…bookshelf of delight and instruction, as entertaining as it is illuminating.”

Jill Lepore, New York Times bestselling author

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

Winner of The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020

Winner of The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020

Winner of The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020

Winner of The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020

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