Bill Bell
From the Abattoir to Amazon
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading
By Leah Price
Basic Books 214pp £22.99 order from our bookshop
What do we talk about when we talk about books? Over the course of five chapters, Leah Price takes us on an excursion through the hidden trails and forgotten routes of books and reading during three centuries, uncovering the relationship between the printed cultures of the past and more recent developments in the media landscape, which some believe have overturned the old order. Don’t expect any conventional arguments from this part memoir, part history, part cabinet of biblio-curiosities. If you are anticipating the usual defence of the traditional book against the challenges posed by Kindles, iPads, audio books and all of the other pretenders at the library gates, you will be sadly disappointed.
In fact, anxieties about the fate of books and reading appear to be nothing new. While commentators in these days of information overload might bemoan the decline of ‘slow reading’, authorities in the past cautioned against the
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
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From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553