Where I'm Reading From:The Changing World of Booksby Tim ParksNew York Review of Books, 2015Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books, a New York Review of Books reprint volume of some of the latest deadline and occasional pieces by novelist and travel writer Tim Parks, sports on its cover a detailed shot from Jeff Wall's 1993 A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), which depicts a flurry of loose pages caught in a moment of chaos, and there's something of that same note of chaos in the subtitle of Parks' book, and in a glance at its contents – pieces on copyright under fire, or the rise of electronic books, or, more basically, the whole battered industry of writing-about-books of which this volume itself is an example. In his opening remarks, Parks seems to speak from the viewpoint of the man in Wall's work, haplessly standing there while everything around him blows to pieces:

Above all it's understood that books are introduced into a fierce competition for what few crumbs of celebrity TV and film have left to them. They have to hit the ground running. Toward the end there may or may not be a precious quote the publisher can use for the cover of the paperback edition. In 99.9 percent of cases the reviewer knows perfectly well what books are for, why they are written and read, what's literature and what's genre. He's ticking boxes. Or she. Understandably, the newspapers have reduced the books section to the size of a postage stamp.

With an attitude like that, you want to respond, even a postage stamp might be over-generous. But the rest of the book – outside the curiously gloomy confines of cover and Introduction – is nothing like so down-beat. In reality, Parks is usually a plainspoken and cheerfully straightforward commentator on the literary scene, striking a very comfortable note somewhere north of banality but south of profundity. His book's subtitle, “The Changing World of Books,” is mostly publisher-style overreaching hype; mostly, the things that engage Parks' attention have been open and debated issues in the book-world for decades. What's the nature of reading? Is there a problem with the sudden ubiquity of writing workshops? Are literary biographies too hagiographic? What is lost when an author's success is spurred by the Internet into a global phenomenon? What role does money play in the quality of a writer's work? And in all cases Parks jumps right into the heart of his topic, as in his “Does Copyright Matter?”:

Copyright gives a writer a considerable financial incentive and locks his work into the world of money; each book becomes a lottery ticket. Huge sales will mean a huge income. Copyright thus encourages a novelist to direct his work not to his immediate peer group, those whose approval he most craves, but to the widest possible audience in possession of the price of a paperback.

Or in his winning meditation “E-Books are for Grown-Ups,” in which his praise of the many, many superiorities of electronic books over their printed counterparts gradually deepens into some sharp observations on the exact nature of the the thing that both e-book and printed book share:

What are the core characteristics of literature as a medium and an art form? Unlike painting there is no physical image to contemplate, nothing that impresses itself on the eye in the same way, given equal eyesight. Unlike sculpture, there is no artifact you can walk around and touch. You don't have to travel to look at literature. You don't have to line up or stand in the crowd, or worry about getting a good seat. Unlike music you don't have to respect its timing, accepting an experience of a fixed duration. You can't dance to it or sing along, or take a photo or make a video with your phone.

These pieces were first published in The New York Review of Books, and they reflect that journal's favored combination of literary erudition and Boston Primer basics: Parks asks a series of frank, softball questions and then serves up fairly non-controversial answers garlanded with allusions to Borges. Very few writers working today do this sort of thing better than Parks, so having dozens of these pieces collected in a sturdy, attractive hardcover, ready to be re-read and enjoyed at any moment, which will be a wonderful convenience for those NYRB readers who've previously consulted these essays as yellowing clippings cut from the journal itself. The fact that the good folk a the New York Review of Books have made it such an attractive package is an added bonus.