Whole books

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Friday, September 3rd, 2010 | blogging

Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: “I have looked into it.” “What,” said Elphinston, “have you not read it through?” Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, “No, Sir, do you read books through?” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson).

I began teaching my two courses this week, on “Public Policy and the Arts″ and on “Arts Administration and the Cultural Sector” (more-or-less an applied economics class for arts managers) and did not assign any books to purchase – students read journal and newspaper articles, some government publications, a few chapters from books, and (really) some blog posts. At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano would not be impressed:

My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole″ books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think? …

Many college-age sorts study their phones, put them away to try to focus on something else—the passing scenery outside the Amtrak train, a magazine, the old-fashioned book they’ve brought along—then yank the phones back out three or four minutes later and start tapping away again. Reading a book, however, requires concentration, endurance, the ability to disconnect from other connections. You have to be there rather than not there. Hyperwired young people may be making it to age 17 without acquiring that ability, let alone losing it. …

Yes, we know—what is a book, after all? Anything an editor at a publishing house agrees to put between two covers, or zap to a Kindle/Sony Reader/Nook? Isn’t it often truly (when the cachet of the word is put aside) just a thrown-together collection of short pieces stitched together, or a rush job, rather than a sustained, coherent text of 250 to 1,000 pages?

And who says that teaching whole books as whole books makes good sense anyway? Is every word of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, or Darwin’s The Origin of Species, really necessary to understand those books? Doesn’t Tolstoy run on at times?

Reasonable issues, all. But whatever clever eristic moves you make, there’s a problem on the horizon—extreme academe is heading our way. Will professors hold the line? Will they insist that the most distracted generation in history rise to the challenge of reading books, or will future faculty members replace the book with the chapter?

Well, yes, I guess I have replaced the book with the chapter. But I’m a Samuel Johnson sort. I have a lot of books. I read fiction “through” (unless I get bored of it), but although I own a lot of nonfiction much of it is work I dip into from time to time, and find interesting things, but never read the complete work. Many classics are not necessarily worth the time and effort of the whole book. I have read chapters of brilliant insight in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but I’ve never read it through, and feel no guilt about that – there is a lot there about which I have little interest. I have not read The Origin of Species or Freud “through″, but have enjoyed browsing. In reality there are far too many great books to manage reading them all through – some of them yes, but I don’t see the problem of excerpts.

Friday, April 7, I dined with him at a Tavern, with a numerous company. JOHNSON. “I have been reading Twiss’s Travels in Spain, which are just come out. They are as good as the first book of travels that you will take up. They are as good as those of Keysler or Blainville; nay, as Addison’s, if you except the learning. They are not so good as Brydone’s, but they are better than Pococke’s. I have not, indeed, cut the leaves yet; but I have read in them where the pages are open, and I do not suppose that what is in the pages which are closed is worse than what is in the open pages.” (Boswell – both quotations are posted by Tony Reinke – the first one I knew about because it was on an old bookmark I once had that I’ve now misplaced, but the Google is great for taking a fragment of a quote and finding the whole).