Читать книгу Reading Quirks - Andrés de la Casa Huertas - Страница 9

9

nothing but pain and heartbreak ever came of it, not to mention the occasional assault. Better to do like that smart young woman on page 15 who buys all the copies of a favorite book to give to her friends, thereby saving herself the bother of murdering them when they don’t return her copy.

Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Reading Quirks poses the question: Is there a place for our tribe in the modern world? A world in which the current leader of earth’s most powerful country hasn’t even read the books he’s supposed to have written. What does it mean to be a reader, to keep faith with the force of words, particularly words printed in ink on actual sheets of paper? “Why do you read?” asks the little girl on the very last page of this book. “I don’t know,” answers the man with a book in his hands. “The me-aning of life?” I won’t reveal the punch line, but one

wonders what constitutes meaning in our “post-truth” era of “alternative facts,” of information-delivery me-chanisms that are essentially click-and-swipe compul-sion machines? We, our tribe, are we mistaken to hold fast to that old-economy artifact, the book?

Books are no less fallible than any other medium, but they give us something precious that the almighty touch-screen does not. They give us space: the space to be human. Space to breathe, absorb, ponder; to sit and contemplate, and perhaps work out way toward something approaching wisdom without our fingers itching to swipe to the next website, more hits for our already overloaded brains. The slow knowledge of books: this is the secret pleasure of our tribe, a secret we gladly share--as Reading Quirks shows--with the entire world.