Review by Choice Review
Writing in a style that is erudite yet accessible, scholarly yet warm, Price (Rutgers Univ.) explores digital-era anxieties about the decline of reading and attendant mythologizing of books as the cure to what ails us. Price has in mind a particular form of reading (one among many functions of the book): intensive, cover-to-cover, focused, solitary absorption in long-form prose. This form of reading, Price argues, is equated to personal virtues and intellectual skills supposedly lost in the digital era. Whereas 21st-century pundits and scholars alike point to books as the solution to these losses, Price points out that books played the villain in analogous debates in the 18th and 19th centuries. Though Price builds on her analysis of the book as material object in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (CH, Sep'12, 50-0021), the current volume is both historically wide-ranging and deeply personal (Price includes a remarkable interlude about how an injury transformed her relationship to books and reading). This is a work for anyone who cares about books and reading in the 21st century. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Lesley Goodman, Albright College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Do you ever worry that you can't focus on reading more than a Facebook post or listicle? In her latest, Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, 2012) notes early on that the history of reading is also a history of worrying. Over the course of the book she drops many such truths. Where we now recommend reading as a panacea to escape the fear of immersive technology, once we warned that the very act of reading could be distracting, addictive, and disruptive to a healthy life. Price's premise, that there truly was no golden age of reading that we should be trying to get back to, is presented with humor and charm. Price is an avid scholar of books as objects (not just of their texts) and her wit extends to the very format of the book, which carries surprises beyond her observations and research. For fans of Susan Orlean's The Library Book (2018) and other books about books. Those still worried that technology has spoiled their attention span shouldn't be. Price gets to her point in under 200 pages.--Diana Platt Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain), a Rutgers English professor and the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, combines a lighthearted romp through literary history with a serious intent: to argue that the rise of e-texts is not the radical change often claimed. In fact, Price argues, change is the norm in print history: the world moved from papyrus to parchment to paper, and from scrolls to codices to books, while books themselves have changed from giant medieval compilations of parchment chained in place, to early-20th-century pocketbooks printed on onionskin. Price notes that with the advent of e-texts, physical books have a newly elevated status based in nostalgia for a pre-electronic era--and are increasingly employed as therapy, their purpose displaced from the joy of reading to self-improvement. Price's factual tidbits are entertaining: for example, the first vegetarian cookbook was, ironically, bound with and printed on animal skins. However, her penchant for labored analogies--"Print is to digital as Madonna is to whore"--will strain even the most forgiving reader's patience. Nevertheless, Price provides welcome comfort that the beloved book is in good shape, regardless of the form it ultimately takes. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Books are not dead. That's the good news in this set of bookish essays.It wasn't long ago, writes Rutgers Book Initiative founding director Price (How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, 2012, etc.), that writers such as Sven Birkerts and Robert Coover were remarking, and sometimes lamenting, the supposed decline of the book in favor of other technologiesthe computer, the e-reader, etc. In fact, reading physical books is on the rise, and in December 2018, holiday shoppers found several popular titles on back order for "that most old-fashioned of crises: a paper shortage." The widespread availability of digital devices doesn't seem to have put much of a dent in the market for physical books, though new technologies have certainly affected reading in the pastmost notably, Price archly observes, TV. What has really cut into reading time, she adds, is the in-between time we used to devote to reading books and newspapers, the time spent on bus-stop benches or commuter trains, time now so often given to navigating the many iterations of social media. Books as objects seem safe, then, though mysteries still surround them: Those data crunchers who use electronic tools to see what books people are looking at most still can't answer why we're looking at them. As Price writes, in a nice turn, "no matter how many keystrokes you track and blinks you time, others' reading remains as hard to peer into as others' hearts." The essays suggest more than form a single coherent argument about the book today, but Price's ideas that books are a communal thing and that reading them, in at least one sense, is a profoundly social act are pleasing even if libraries are now different from our childhood memories and if those books come in many forms besides between covers.Readers who enjoy books about books will find much to like here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
