The Art of Reading Books

There’s something about the pages of a book. The smooth white surface and the clean black typeface. The thickness and texture of the paper, the sound it makes when flipped over, papery thin or stiffly formal. And there’s the scent of the page— a subtle effusion ranging from the pleasant mustiness of an old tome to the aromatic newness of the latest bestseller. An open book is an invitation to slow down, to let your mind go deep and wide, to wander and come back, to dream and to think, all while remaining perfectly still, effortlessly balanced.

Pity the online piece of writing, on the other hand. It’s been thrown into the rat race, continuously in competition, jostled by ads, crowded by images and links, eclipsed by an endless stream of new arrivals. And pity the reader of that writing. Even when the user interface is cleared of all the bells and whistles, the ambient light, the pixels, the bubble-like precariousness of the medium itself can produce a strained experience, full of doubt and dissatisfaction and the sense that there must be something better just one more click away. Don’t get me wrong. I spend my fair share of time reading and writing online. The digital space is wide open and global and full of innovation, full of engagement, full of social connection. It has allowed a true, almost universal accessibility that we could only dream of a generation ago.

Still, there are essential qualities of the printed page that can’t be replicated on a screen. So if you want to fully engage in the art of reading books, here are three key elements to keep in mind.

The Pleasure of the Printed Page

Books are relaxing. This isn’t generally the case with online reading where you’re constantly lured to “reply,” “follow,” “block,” “buy” — where you’re endlessly stimulated (or provoked) to do something about whatever it is you’re reading. A book is immersive in a way that calms and soothes. Who hasn’t snuggled up with a good book? A book has a pleasing physicality that is familiar and reassuring and just plain comfy. You can take it to bed. You can sit in a chair with it. Turning over each new page is a sensory delight, one that gives an emotional satisfaction; you feel yourself physically moving through the book as your move through the words and through the story or the unfolding argument. There is an intellectual and imaginative pleasure in reading the words on a page, and there is also a sensuous enjoyment that we tend to discount.

If you want to be a true artist of reading books, revel in the pleasure of the paper, the binding, the sharp black print. I love cover art and authors’ photos. I love title pages. I look at the back matter to see who designed the typeface. I’ve read the same book, Moby Dick, in different editions and it is a different experience each time. The first time I read it (when my eyes were stronger), it was a cheap, unabridged pocket edition. You can imagine how tiny that typeface was. But I could carry it around everywhere, the way I now carry around my cell phone, except that the only world I had access to through that compact little parcel of text was the imagination and intellect of Herman Melville. It was the purest reading pleasure to be transported from a bouncy city bus to the rise and fall of the Pequod on the high seas.

The Privacy of the Printed Page

A book allows you to explore without the fear of prying eyes. My very Catholic Mexican mother would turn off the television if she heard a mildly bad word like “bastard” or even a dry, antiseptic discussion of sexual reproduction. But I could read the most radical political or sexual content imaginable and, so long as it was in the pages of a book, she remained blissfully unaware and never bothered me. At the movies, I got carded if I wanted to get into an R-rated flick, but I could go to the the public library or to a bookstore and get Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or the works of Henry Miller, or an assortment of bestselling titles “unsuitable” for a teenage girl. No one cared what I was reading. And even if they did, it always seemed to me that librarians and booksellers are like priests in their respectful confidentiality.

Now I’m an adult of many years and I could theoretically read anything I’d like online, but I feel eyes on me all the time. I feel the unrelenting surveillance of corporations and governments. Without a sense of privacy there is no real freedom to explore, to think unthinkable thoughts, to make mistakes. Perhaps an antidote to our overwhelming hyper-capitalism is the simple book. The privacy of its pages allows you to develop a kind of force field against all the extreme commercialization and consumerism that is rewiring (or warping) our minds. They want us glued to the screen, always “engaged” but in a manner designed for maximum profit. Any one of us who “goes dark” in the privacy of the page, any one of us who wanders off on our own intellectual journey, is a net loss on their ledgers. But for us it is all gain. A book affords us a space to think, about ourselves and about the world around us (including the ever more dominant digital world). Of course books are bought and sold like any other commodity within capitalism. But the miraculous thing about a book is that it has a kind of soul. The essence of a book can’t be sold and it can’t be bought. It is created by the author and the reader through the absolute and inviolate privacy of the page.

The Patience of the Printed Page

The screen glitters at you, desperate for your attention, but it is this very neediness that drives you away. You’ll read but you’re getting tired out with every minute that passes. Even if you have the strength or the addictive personality to keep going for hours on end, it is a prickly kind of reading, a jittery experience of hopping from one site to the next, dropping most of what you pick up along the way. But the page is patient. You can read as slowly as you’d like. You can stop to have a cup of tea or drink the tea as you read, a little sip, a little reading, a little looking out the window. The page doesn’t mind. It doesn’t even mind if you fall asleep on it.

Of course, the page doesn’t neglect its duty to be interesting, to draw you in gently and hold your attention. It is an enchanting host, anticipating your every need but not in a servile way. I once took a class in college solely because it included on its syllabus Remembrance of Things Past, the three thousand page autobiographical novel by Marcel Proust. I thought the discipline of assignments and exams was the only way I could get through this classic of world literature that I wanted to check off my Literature Major reading list. I was wrong. Each page was enticing all on its own, giving a little and promising more. A metaphor here, a bit of music there. A philosophy. A character. A scene. An exuberant description of a garden. The book went about things on its own terms and somehow got me to stay with it, page after page. I didn’t feel in any hurry, even with the final exam hovering over me. In fact the final exam was reduced to its proper place by the patience of the page. What was one little exam when measured against the strange, grand passionate obsession of Swann for Odette? Could love really be like this? And was this really the essence of art? Was this the true nature of our passage through time? Was this what it meant to be alive?Proust’s work struck a chord in me that has only grown more resonant as I have grown older. The pages of a book have decades, have a lifetime of patience.

If you read books, you’re not just a reader. You’re engaging in the art of reading books. You’re elevating your mind and deepening your soul. So pour yourself a cup of tea, find yourself a cozy spot, maybe by the window, and give yourself over to the printed page.