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‘Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it.

I’ve loved books ever since I saw my father holding one in his hand when he read to me at night. It was as if stories hid between the pages just waiting to leap out as soon as the cover was opened. Even the ones I knew by heart seemed anxious to wave to me again like my friends at kindergarten did after the Christmas holidays.

But the real magic of books was in discovering that the stories actually lived in words printed on the pages; my father had merely given them sounds and imbued them with meaning. As I moved through the grades at school I never lost the excitement of discovering that similar words in different orders could often convey even more thought-provoking and intriguing ideas than the people around me did. I suspect that books and my questions about who had written them were the real reasons I was drawn to university.

The problem, however, was that there were so many books -too many to read them all, of course; but even more worrisome, their contents were too varied to retain for long; they contained too much information to file away in my head and access on demand. And even though I have more time now that I’m retired, Age has not been kind to my retrieval skills. My house is filled with books, but apart from vague recollections of their previous influences on me, I am reduced to leafing through those that have again tweaked my interest, and hoping that I have underlined or made marginal notes on the important points.

But if instead, I turn to new books and buy or borrow them from the library or friends, I quickly sate my initial curiosity and deflect it to yet more books, yet more questions. I’m not sure how much I am retaining -especially now that my ability to concentrate has become inversely proportional to my increasing burden of years. I can no longer ‘eat’ books at the same rate. Much as I have had to trim back the volume of food I can tolerate at one sitting in my dotage lest I find myself beset with indigestion, I often find I am now reduced to simply tasting books like a cow would taste grass, and then chew on a few of its ideas later.

I was beginning to worry about neural plaques and things plugging up the normal memory circuits of the brain I used when I was young, when I happened upon an article bemoaning the language that has been used to describe our current reading habits. Unlike the more recent metaphors, a few hundred years ago describing someone as ‘devouring’ a book would have been an act of moral censure. The 17th century philosopher, Francis Bacon, for example, said that some books were to be tasted, and the others swallowed. And, in the 18th century, writers began to distinguish between appetite (the connection between reading and the body) and taste (connection between reading and the mind).[i] In fact, reading too much or too quickly could lead to indigestion, and those who craved, gobbled and devoured texts were, by implication, vulgar.

Of course, nowadays, with the advent of social media posts and their bite-sized hors d’oeuvres serving as the information-suppliers on our phones, there is a fear among many of the older less tech-savvy population that actual detailed reading may be vanishing; the idea of eating words is again surfacing as a desired activity; devouring is now a valuable metaphor because it signifies interest.

Recently the Guardian newspaper described how the Man Booker Prize judges spent ‘a summer… devouring novel after magnificent novel’.  ‘Devouring’ also implies a certain tempo – it idealises the fast-paced reading experience. It promotes a certain kind of writing. If a book grips us, if it sucks us in like a Hollywood thriller, it’s doing its ‘job’. Any work that elicits a slower, more ruminative reading experience is cast as defective. Any reading strategy that resists or disrupts the linear drive of the page-turner is dismissed.’ii

As a member of the population of elders that I noted above though, I’m afraid I have to disagree. There is more to writing than clumping a pile of ideas together to be swallowed like ice cream, the flavours merely enticing us to consume more of the product.

But the language of taste encourages slowed-down reading habits; it reminds us to be more attentive to the subtle ways in which texts have been put together by their creators – to think before quickly bingeing through the pages.[iii]

Of course, there’s an alternate world I could have inhabited if I had not been so enamoured with the carefully structured building of ideas through words. There were books scattered all around our house when I was a child but, had I adopted a different course as my tastes matured, the bathroom was always replete with Reader’s Digests for quick, pithy synopses should I ever have been asked to comment on a real book I hadn’t actually tasted. There were also frequently traded Classic Comic Books available that time which outlined the plot of many of the famous books we studied in school. And of course there were the Cole’s Notes of my high school days in Ontario, and the various instruction books for Dummies which began to appear long after my sojourn in university.

I suppose what I am getting at is that my love for words could have been derailed: reading anything longer than what fits on a digital screen might not have been judged worthy of the effort; my vocabulary could easily have been decorated by four-letter words; and my discovery of Michel de Montaigne who lived and wrote in the 16th century and is credited as being the first essayist, might never have happened.

All of that deception would have been disingenuous, of course, although pretending I preferred sports to books might have saved me the accusation of ‘teacher’s pet’ and helped to deflect the teasing about always sitting in the front seat of the classroom. Real guys didn’t do that.

But I only sat in the front because I couldn’t see the new reading assignments written on the blackboard from the back…

[i] https://aeon.co/ideas/is-devouring-books-a-sign-of-superficiality-in-a-reader

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

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