Old Curmudgeons in the Penny Press!

There’s a certain kind of purity-of-the-turf book-article that I expect to encounter on a regular basis in the Penny Press, and yet even though I expect it, the encounters are always a bit depressing. The theme never changes: I’m an old-fashioned reader; I’ll never cozy up to these new-fangled electronic books or electronic reading gizmos, always couched in the attitude of a lonely rearguard defender of the pure and the true. It’s tiresome, I know, but there seems to be an unending hunger for such squibs on the part of my fellow assigning editors.

The culprit this time around crops up in the latest TLS, in the “Freelance” feature, where Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda goes on the old familiar wheeze about digital e-readers. His very inviting specific topic – Dirda is excellent at this kind of inviting topic – is that well-known delicious agony known to book-people of all ages: how to pick which books to pack for a journey. Dirda rightly points out what a reliable little pleasure this ritual can be – I’ve shared that experience many, many times (although during my really intense travel-years, I freed myself from it by always traveling with the same handful of books), so I was nodding as I read Dirda’s article even while I was grimacing at his glancing mention of the undeniable fact that e-readers solve the problem completely.

They do, of course. Prior to a journey, you can load your e-reader with dozens of books – free classics from Project Gutenberg, vast amounts of mainstream backlist in hundreds of genres, and the whole swath of brand new titles. And you can load all those titles in less time than it takes to prowl your bookshelves and pull down one or two – or ten – physical books.

This is simple: there is no argument in favor of the prowling and the pulling-down. To repeat: e-readers simply win this comparison. A writing-program is simply better than a manual typewriter. Satellite weather-tracking is simply better than not knowing a hurricane is coming. And when it comes to ease, speed, portability, and convenience, e-readers are simply better than printed books. The aesthetic experience of curling up with a printed book (and the smell – ye gods, if I hear one more proud Luddite rhapsodize about the lovely smell of printed books), yes – I love it as much as anybody, and nothing can replace it. But the practicalities of books? The getting, the lugging around, even the annotating? There’s no contest.

Dirda’s a smart guy. He knows this as well as anybody, whether he enjoys knowing it or not. He knows that a palm-sized metal slate that’s magically able to be hundreds of books is simply better than hundreds of two-pound bound things, each one of which can necessarily be only one book. But still, he starts in right away about the tangled logistics of choosing which printed books go in the bag:

One should always pack a back-up. That Agatha Christie might turn out to be one you’ve already read or you might find yourself stuck in Iowa an extra day, with only cornfields as fars as the eye can see.

(Dirda being a world-famous book critic and just a tad citified, it’s likely that if he ever finds himself “stuck in Iowa an extra day,” he’ll be stuck in Iowa City, which might be surrounded by cornfields as far as the eye can see but is also home to the splendid Prairie Lights bookstore, where Dirda could easily find some extra titles to save him)

Dirda quite delightfully goes through some of the various adventures he’s had with books on the road, and like everybody who reads this author, I was immediately under the spell of his narrative. And then I came to the end of the little piece and had the spell rudely broken – as of course was inevitable, since the thing I bumped up against was the whole point of the piece in the first place:

Nevertheless, I’m not going to buy one of those cutesy e-readers. No pain, no gain – that’s my motto. A man needs to suffer for his art, even if that art is merely writing book reviews.

*Sigh* No pain, no gain – but Dirda’s been in the book-reviewing game long enough to know the pain is the crappy books, not the lugging of the crappy books. If he wants to say he just doesn’t like reading books on those palm-sized metal plates, that’s fine – Luddite, but fine. But this misty suggestion that there’s something more valid, even more grown up about lugging around heavy printed books (they aren’t “cutesy”) – well, that’s just simple low-boil masochism, the intentional preferring of something inconvenient or even painful over a more convenient and less painful alternative. Luddites are almost always masochistic, and masochists are almost always proud of their fear.

It’s just a shame! How much better would it be for readers all over the world, I imagine, if a reader as readable and famous as Dirda (who hardly has a script for being a curmudgeon – he’s younger than I am, and I absolutely love my “cutesy” e-reader) were to write a TLS “Freelance” piece singing the praises of this technology that’s come along and totally evaporated a long-standing irritation of printed books. Instead of saying “BAH – I’ll accept the irritation, because I’m a real reader.”

Still, the holidays are coming – maybe somebody will not only give him a first-rate e-reader (my own suggestion would be the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4) but sit there by the fireside under the frosted windows and walk him through its wonders. I’ll cross my fingers for a very different “Freelance” piece in four or five months’ time.