Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Zadie Smith has a great essay in the Guardian entitled “Fail Better” which is about the quest by novelists to write great books. After a lengthy discussion of a novel’s various components, she then gets to the heart of matter, which is basically the affect that novels have on us:

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don’t care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks; I don’t care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family; I don’t care if it refuses to use the letter e or crosses five continents and two thousand pages. What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives.”

And what needs to be remembered — in terms of the debate over the future of the book — is that the animating power comes not from the page but from the words. How anyone reads and absorbs a great novel is just about the least important aspect of the process; what’s vitally important is that they read and absorb the novel. Whether that means through a printed book, an audio download, listening to it on a CD, or else reading it on a laptop or even a cell phone, to echo Smith’s refrain from above, I don’t care how you read it and long as you read it.
The Guardian: “Fail Better”