A Walker in the Suburbs

I finally read the book Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Published in 2010, this is the story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic athlete and World War II airman who was shot down over the Pacific.

Zamperini and two other crew members drifted thousands of miles (47 days with sharks constantly encircling their flimsy raft) before being captured by the Japanese — and their real troubles began.

Beaten, starved, humiliated — but somehow never giving in — Zamperini survived the war and the first difficult years that followed. He has lived a rich, full life.

It’s an old-fashioned good read, and it stays with you. Not the details of plot, but the lessons of character. Read a book like Unbroken and it’s difficult to feel sorry for yourself.

In the midst of a long-postponed office clean-up, looking through every file folder, feeling virtuous about the growing pile of to-be-recycled papers, I learn that my e-mail is being upgraded. Quick, I have to purge my electronic files, too.

Are we the only generation who will straddle this digital divide? What does it mean to live with one foot in the world of paper, books, interview notes printed and stapled, marked-up manuscripts — and the other in e-mail, text messages, tweets, jpeg and mp3 files?

Does it make us more tolerant? More inventive?

Or does it just make us more tired?

I walked into our local bookstore a few days ago to find an empty space where most of the books used to be. Shelving stacked in corners. A few sections still intact, history, business, religion. But fiction? Gone. Children’s books? Decimated.

The bookstore in Union Station, my go-to place from the office, that one is closing, too.

It’s enough to make a print person crazy! I know the codex is doomed. I know that three-year-olds have kindles.  I know that libraries have become “media centers.”

But can’t we take this a little more slowly? Aren’t these transformations supposed to take generations?

I guess even change is changing.

It’s no secret that the printed book is under siege, that newspapers and magazines are ceasing publication or becoming online only, that information delivery is being revolutionized before our (increasingly blurry) eyes. Any doubts the Kindle may have left behind, the iPad is dispelling.

Which made reading the following all the more delightful: “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered,” according to author Umberto Eco in a new book about the book called (appropriately and straightforwardly) This is Not the End of the Book.

The book, which was reviewed today by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, is essentially a conversation between Eco and French screenwriter and bibliophile Jean-Claude Carriere. The Internet gives us “gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy,” Carriere says. “As soon as you click on the next page you forget what you’ve just read,” Eco says.

And I thought it was just me. I flipped through Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending the other day and could summon almost no memory of reading it, despite the fact that I definitely did read it earlier this year — though, it must be noted, on a Kindle.

I’ve written about this before, and probably will again (and again and again). But reading this review (and, I hope soon, the book itself) made me feel less alone in my Luddite ways. Maybe the codex isn’t really in danger. Maybe the book really will survive. Wouldn’t that be nice?

It’s harvest time — in more ways than one. In the last few weeks the magazine, brochures and booklets I worked on this summer have been delivered to the office.  I’ve been busy with what we used to call “fulfillment.” Which is another way of saying I’ve been schlepping boxes around.

As print publications are replaced by electronic ones, I assemble evidence to defend the hard copy. But I have to laugh. Even as I tally the numbers and build my case, nothing on paper tells the story as well as handing someone a box of magazines and asking him to hold it for a minute. A box of magazines weighs 30 pounds. It is real. It is tangible. There is no way to overlook it.

Once our lives were filled with real tasks. Toting water, splitting wood, wringing clothes.  For many of us now, a day’s work consists of tapping a keyboard or touching a screen. We’re active only from the wrist down. I liked carrying those 30-pound magazine boxes. It was the least I could do for them.  My mind’s labor had helped to produce them. Now it was time for my arms and legs to take charge.

Would I want to do this all day long? Absolutely not. When the arms are carrying 30 pounds the mind can think of little else. Still, I enjoyed this weighty toil. It made me tired in the evening, and it gave me something to think about.

Photo: bestcardboardboxes.com

The Writer’s Alamanc tells us that today is the anniversary of Penguin’s first paperback editions. Apparently, publisher Allen Lane was looking for something to read on the train and found only magazines and Victorian novel reprints. At the time, quality books were thought to deserve only quality bindings, which made them expensive to acquire and not very portable, either.

Lane remedied that by publishing Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway paperbacks in the summer of 1935; the books cost the same as a pack of cigarettes. The publisher then expanded into other titles (classics, nonfiction and children’s literature genres) and had soon sold more than 3 million copies.

I have a few Penguin classics in my collection; more to the point, I have a lot of paperbacks. Long ago I had to make a decision: I would either buy a lot of paperbacks or not very many hardcovers. I chose the former, figuring that what’s important is the content of the books, not their durability. It’s what you might call a poor woman’s library. But when I take down one of the volumes, and read the words on the (perhaps now yellowing) page, I couldn’t feel richer.

“Candor has been greatly, perhaps too greatly, heightened in our day. With the stakes of candor everywhere raised, the premium is on the new and edgy. People who write autobiographies or memoirs must have something at least slightly shocking — better of course if it is powerfully shocking — to convey.”

In his newish book Gossip, essayist Joseph Epstein brings his elegant prose style, his wit and his erudition to bear on a subject with which many of us are all too familiar.

A couple of years ago, I tried to give up gossiping for Lent. It was even more difficult than forgoing chocolate, no easy feat itself. Reading Epstein’s book I realize why I had trouble. Gossip has been with us from the beginning. It is part of the human condition. At times it even serves a moral purpose.

But in “these times” (oh, how my children hate to hear me talk like this!) — that is, in a celebrity culture where rumors travel at the speed of, well, whatever speed the Internet operates, which is pretty fast — gossip has morphed into something much more insidious and tricky.

Epstein tells some juicy tales in this book, but he also analyzes how society has become more gossip-riven and gossip-tolerant. How it has created a “change of social tone, an accumulation of many bridges being lowered … [ which has ] helped to bring down the decorum that was a strong feature of — let us call it — square society. Not too many people around today to defend square society, with all its rules and inhibitions.”

Thank God there are a few, Joseph Epstein, of course, being among them.

Full disclosure: I took a class from Epstein in college. It was under his tutelage that I wrote my first real essay.