Our up-coming cover for the fall Shadow’s issue is by English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood from her Bram Stoker’s Chair series. This summer I took in one of her video installations at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a playful piece of Robert Downey Jr. lip-syncing badly to an Elton John ballad as he walks languidly through an empty mansion. Her first feature film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool opens in October before the seventieth anniversary of his birth. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. You can view Sam Taylor-Wood’s work at www.whitecube.com

Kris Somerville is the marketing director of The Missouri Review.

Strong Motion, Franzen’s second novel, is set in Boston, a city I used to live in, and the overwhelming emotion in the book is barely channeled rage.  It’s anger from an author’s whose first book wasn’t a big hit, anger that is poured into the characters and the narrative into a multilayered howl against injustice across a wide-range of people, places, and events.  This anger, however raw and channeled it might be, is delicious.  Strong Motion certainly has flaws, but the emotions, however uncontrolled they are, captivate me.  Which is why I keep coming back to it.

(Digression: not lately, though.  Why, exactly, I’m not sure.)

Recently I began what I am still calling a “new project” and compiled a list of books to read and re-read.  When beginning something new, I like to absorb as many novels as I possibly can that might have similar thematic elements, then pushing them all aside and forgetting them, at least consciously, as I tackle my narrative.  And at the top of this current list were The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, both of which I’ve just finished within the last two weeks.

No one, it seems, reads The Catcher in the Rye as an adult.  It’s a book taught in junior high or high school, and what I remembered of the book was that Holden was tossed out of school, cursed frequently, and wandered around New York for a few days.  Being told it is a “great” or “important” book didn’t make any difference to me when I was a teenager.  I had a vague recollection of it being good but not feeling any strong affinity for it the way other books struck me in high school (My standout?  A bit of an odd one: Kindred by Octavia Butler).

My reading experience as an adult is of course different now.  What I read for nowadays—engaging language, complex characters, moving imagery, a sense of place—were concepts that I couldn’t even contextualize in high school.  Nowadays, there is no rush for me to get through the book either: there isn’t a paper to be written or another class’s homework to finish.  And, when rereading, I always know what happens in the end.

An adult reader should be struck by the youthfulness of Holden, and how true and accurate Salinger’s vision is of Holden’s existential dread.  I’m not sure how much a teenager reader could appreciate it; recognize and relate, sure, but the sense of it being a period that can be survived, the memory of that time in our lives, creates a strong connection with Holden, a hope that if he can just get through the next few days, he’ll be all right.  Being an adult reader makes Holden all that more sympathetic as a character.  Then there is the incredible and overwhelming loneliness in the book.  Early in the novel, when Holden is speaking with Ackley, Holden stops speaking:

“I didn’t answer him.  All I did was, I got up and went over and looked out the window.  I felt all lonesome, all of the sudden.  I almost wished I was dead”

After a few chapters of Holden’s sarcasm and petulance, this simple and direct awareness is devastating; I choked a little over that passage and reread it, twice, and wondered if I remembered the ending of the book correctly.

I sorta did (hey, that sounds like Holden!).  There’s this beautiful, wrenching moment at he end of the novel when Holden is in the park with his sister Phoebe:

“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking w, especially my neck and my pants.  My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot protection, in a way, but I go soaked anyway.  I didn’t care, though.  I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around.  I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth.  I don’t know why.  It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

Kinda feels like we are.

Still, the sense is that the reason this book is so well known and widely read is notoriety and celebrity: it was frequently banned and Salinger was reclusive, and the American public just loves that stuff, and maybe the novel has been elevated into something greater than perhaps it is.  Holden’s isolation is entirely the point, but that point does become a little tiresome in the book, where every person either rejects Holden or is rejected by Holden.  This point begins to feel like The Point, which is why, perhaps, I think of the novel as worth reading but not necessarily one of my favorite books.

A Separate Peace is a novel that I believe I read at an even younger age than Salinger; for some reason, I’m thinking seventh or eighth grade.  Again, the appeal, the why it was taught to me in school, seems obvious: friendship among young man, the prep school, World War II.  And so forth.  So it was really amazing to discover what an incredible novel Knowles wrote: a brilliantly framed story of betrayal and duality where every chapter grabbed my attention like a hand around my neck.

Gene and Phineas—has there been kids named Gene and Phineas since 1950?—are best friends at the Devon School in New England in 1942.  The opening chapter provides indicators of Phineas’s death and the two places he fell—the tree by the river, and the marble steps of the First Academy Building—are revisited by Gene, fifteen years removed from these events, seemingly much older than his actually thirty years (he moves and thinks like a man twice that age).

As with The Catcher in the Rye, I only remembered the book’s basics.  The quote on the cover of the Scribner paperback edition is from critic Aubrey Menen, who wrote that “it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself.”  Really?  And I read this in eighth grade?  I had no memory of experiencing the book that way at all.

Like the Salinger, knowing the outcome makes me read slower, and Knowles’s prose is pitch perfect.  He’s efficient, wasting no words to describe the Devon School, quick and loving descriptions of New England elms and tall, narrow windows in the red-brick buildings of campus.  Every passage is filled with dread.  Chapter four opens with this:

“The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing … (Phineas) was still asleep, although in this drained light he looked more dead than asleep. The ocean looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along the beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.”

A good writer doesn’t use the same word four times without meaning.  Later in this chapter, Gene “said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me… It wasn’t my neck, but my understanding which was menaced … I was not of the same quality as he.”  Which is curious on its own, but even more bizarre when, shortly after Phineas’s fall, Gene tries on Phineas’s clothes:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every though, to forget where I was, even who I was … when I looked in the mirror it was no remoter aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life.  I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness.  I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief”

The war within Gene drives the novel, even with Phineas returning to Devon in 1943, crippled and turning into a denier of World War II’s existence.  This part I didn’t remember at all: Phineas denied the war?  The war that forced all the Devon boys to go work in a railyard for a day (a terrific scene), the same day Phineas returns?  When I recognized the way Gene recognizes, rejects, and duplicates Phineas, all at the same time, this denial is terrific: Phineas denies the war in the same way that Gene denies he intentionally jostled his best friend from the tree.

This sense of “two-ness” in both plot and character is what makes this book so captivating.  The boys are in the war, and not in the war.  Gene and Phineas are the best of friends; they are complete enemies.  Gene is dully aware of this throughout the novel, but Phineas (or, some other part of Gene, in a way) continues to deny these conflicts and contradictions, leading to the growing unease between the boy’s and the bizarre trail-like stunt that their classmate Brinker manufactures in order to discover the truth of what happened.

Holden and Phineas suffer from internal turmoil, these questions of identity that seem to be at the heart of all great American novels.  But for me, it’s the way the world encroaches on Gene and Phineas that makes A Separate Peace so much more engaging.  There is a growing threat that they attempt to refuse—the boys aren’t yet old enough to be drafted—but can’t be ignored.  The passage where Leper explains to Gene what happened to him in basic training—a rambling, terrifying monologue of a young man whose mind has cracked—is one of the best things I’ve read all year.

Why reread books we’ve read before?  I often reread Andre Dubus’s stories for no other reason than I enjoy them: his stories are wonderful, patient, and insightful about people who are holding onto their small place in society as they struggle through their marriages, jobs, and their adult children.  His stories are always in a place and time that I don’t recognize as the present but recognize as the world we once lived in that somehow mirrors the world today.  And I believe where we’re from is a large element of who we are.

Stories and novels can become didactic about social and political issues; these narratives always work better as essays rather than fiction.  On the flip side, fiction that ignores the world and places characters in a vacuum of suburbia or the university feels confined, even a little narcissistic in its obsession with whatever angst drives the characters, ignoring their surroundings to the point where the book could be set in Alaska, Arkansas, or Argentina and it wouldn’t make any difference.  The boys in A Separate Peace try to live in this vacuum but a world at war continues to blanket and then suffocate them, an encroaching reminder that there cherished time at Devon will soon come to an end.  Knowles novel does all these things I had been seeking: the simmering anger of Franzen, the isolation and identity crisis of Salinger, and the humane understanding of Dubus.  It would perhaps be disingenuous to say A Separate Peace hasn’t been read and appreciated it enough … but then again, maybe I just did.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

This is old news, but news to me, and my immediate impulse, for what it’s worth, is to voice my support for print, because despite Egon Spengler’s insistence as long ago as 1984 that “Print is dead,” I still believe in it, for reasons that have been articulated many times over  across the blogosphere and even outside of it, nowhere more memorably (to me) than in Nicholson Baker’s 2001 book Double Fold, which addresses the ’ tendency among libraries to throw out their print collections in favor of digitization.

The soberer approach, however, might be to see a move like Shenandoah’s – as many others do – as a natural step in the progression of a literary journal that intends to be accessible and relevant in an increasingly digital literary world.  And there are advantages to a move like this one; as Smith’s note reads,

“While many of us harbor divided minds about the dwindling of the physical print medium, I’m enthusiastic about the possibilities – from audio presentations to ease of access and extended audience and more frequent updates – presented by this brave new world of the Internet.”

This is a subject worth discussion far beyond what I can conjure up on my own this Monday afternoon, but I can agree with the above-quoted sentiment wholeheartedly, and not a little because of the nature of my current affiliation with TMR.

Robert Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor.

Thunder Road, Circa 1999

Playing this gig in Oxford meant learning the material (in my case re-learning; I’d played most of the songs before, but a decade earlier), driving the two hours to Oxford for rehearsals, driving to Oxford again for the show, then staying overnight in a motel room (unless I preferred to drive back home in the middle of the night, which I didn’t) that would cost almost as much as the money I earned from the gig. All of which is well and good.

 Except, here’s the thing: the gig never happened.

Why not? The club double-booked us. We learned just days before the show that they’d inadvertently scheduled two bands for the same night—and for various reasons, that other band won out.

Frustrating, but unfortunately just another day in the music biz. In fact, it felt like old times! Which leads me to the reason for this post—to lay out what I’ve come to see as a key difference between playing the drums and writing fiction. Here goes:

 Playing the Drums in a Band, Requirements of

1. Bandmates
2. Tolerant neighbors and/or a house on lots of land
3. Gigs
4. Patience with bar owners who confuse the number “1” (the actual number of bands that can perform on a given stage at a given time) with the number “2” (twice the number of bands that can perform on a given stage at a given time)
5. Somewhat reliable transportation
6. The ability to sleep in your somewhat reliable transportation (or to stay awake, if you’re the one driving)

 Writing Fiction, Requirements of

1. A computer—or pen and paper
2. Coffee and snacks (optional)

Playing music, in other words, requires lots of stuff. Not so with writing stories, which can be done anytime, anywhere, and with nary a ride in a half-busted van. Yes, publishing one’s work is another matter—but after playing music for so long, I quickly came to enjoy an activity that requires so few accoutrements.

If the Springsteen tribute gig gets rescheduled, will I play it? Of course. But for now, rather than be double-booked, I think I’ll just sit here and work on my single book.

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

Tom Bissell, a regular contributor to VQR and author of several books, has a different and thoughtful response to the entire situation:

“Here is a different narrative of the VQR tragedy: Mr. Genoways, in elevating what had previously been a respected but quiet literary journal into one of America’s best magazines, revealed the basic incompatibility of the sinecure model of university employment with the high-pressure, emotionally tempestuous imperatives of commercial publishing. Mr. Genoways’ staff, including Morrissey, did not agree with the direction in which the magazine was going and moreover believed Mr. Genoways was spending too much money. Crucially, Mr. Genoways was bound by one extraordinary quirk of a university- and taxpayer-funded literary magazine. Morrissey, along with the rest of Mr. Genoways’ staff, were state employees first, VQR employees second. While Mr. Genoways could hire staff, he could not easily fire staff, which is the right and prerogative of, say, the editors of The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic, against whom VQR was attempting to compete in terms of content (if not circulation).

“Mr. Genoways was thus forced to run his magazine in what were essentially and increasingly mutinous circumstances. Paradoxically, as the magazine pulled in National Magazine Award nominations and critical acclaim, Mr. Genoways’ relationship to his staff became increasingly toxic. Job productivity suffered and resentments accumulated, even though Mr. Genoways, Morrissey and Waldo Jacquith (the former Web editor of VQR, who told The Today Show that “Ted’s treatment of Kevin in the last two weeks of his life was just egregious”) were drawing a combined compensation of $320,000.”

Read Tom’s entire piece here, and if you haven’t, The Hook’s original story is here. Also, lots of interesting comments at HTML Giant, too. Tip o’ the cap to TMR pal Tayari Jones for the link to Tom’s story.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

Over at Survival of the Book, it was speculated that this subscription model for libraries could potentially save America’s libraries, which are in peril, as a quick Google News search for “libraries” will attest.  Libraries are cutting hours and closing branches – because, of course, they don’t have enough money.

To offer an anecdotal description of the effects of this, when I dwelt in Cleveland in 2006-2007 I lived downtown and commuted to work in the suburbs – for some reason – and by the time I returned home from my long drive, every evening just before six, the library was already locking its doors.  I would have been glad to pay a small fee in order to help keep the building open later than that.  I would have spent my evenings patronizing the table where they displayed their collection of recently published poetry collections – or at least I would have watched television at home with the knowledge that I had the option to go read those poetry collections.

One of the obvious objections to the concept of the subscription library is that it flies in the face of the egalitarian principles we like to uphold, or at least talk about upholding, in America.  But rather than announce that I am all in favor of free libraries and access to them for everyone, whatever the consequences, I should emulate Orwell for a moment, and admit complicating facts.  Here is one:  I am someone who spends much of his time at a library that I pay to use – my university library.  Not only is it funded by my student fees, other students’ tuitions, and money from inevitable other sources; I am willing to shell out tens of dollars a year so that I can have access to my own personal study carrel, buried in the stacks near the literature on handling livestock.  Perhaps the library has resources set aside for community members that I don’t know about, but as far as I can tell a library card costs a non-student, non-faculty, non-staff user $35.  So we do have what amount to subscription libraries, after all.

At least, for now, we have free alternatives to them.  I have to wonder, finally, what a non-university subscription library would look like.  Would it be dramatically different from what we now expect a library to be?  Would it carry only the books that its subscribers requested?  Would it do the important work of archiving our culture’s printed material, which we entrust it with now?  Would it subscribe to the New York Times or USA Today, if it could afford only one, and how would its librarians make that decision?  Would it subscribe to a literary journal?

Robert Foreman is The Missouri Review’s Social Media Editor

When we finally did, I said hello and asked how I could help him.

“I have a question about my subscription,” he said.  “I didn’t get the last issue yet.”

He was serious.  I directed him to our office manager, gave Sara a really? look, and didn’t give it much more thought (I was reading a pretty good story at that moment).  But, it turns out, he was sticking around for a bit.

The subscriber, Brian, had just driven his friend Ari from Tempe, Arizona all the way to Columbia and the good ol’ University of Missouri, where Ari will begin as a PhD candidate this semester.  (Note: that’s a long drive and a good friend!).  Since they were here and had some time, they figured they would swing by our offices and check things out.  Ari meet Speer, who showed him around the offices and talked a little shop about The Missouri Review and writing workshops.  And, then, yes, we got a copy of the summer issue in Brian’s hands.

It was strange, harmless, and kind of fun.  How often do we get to meet our subscribers face-to-face?  Other than the AWP conference, it’s probably rare for a magazine to meet one of its readers in person.  I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that this doesn’t happen too often at Time Magazine or Tin House.  However, I’m not suggesting that any readers should just swing by our offices and knock on our doors and say “Yo. ” Even if we are pretty friendly and we’re centrally located in deepinthehearta-Missouri.

One of the challenges of publishing a literary magazine is that we can’t give the reader exactly what he or she wants.  If you’re reading a news magazine—let’s say The Economist—what you want is relatively clear: what the Obama Administration is doing, what Congress is doing, the cleanup of the Gulf Coast, and all sorts of world news.  Like us, The Economist editors have a style, taste, and focus particular to their magazine.  There are decisions to be made about every issue and how it is examined, but for the most part, the content is already provided by world events.

It’s not that easy for a literary magazine.  Art is subjective.  The taste of our editors varies greatly though there is probably an aesthetic to The Missouri Review.  One of my close friends recently asked why we keep exchanging book recommendations when what we like varies so much: for example, she loved Being Dead by Jim Crace (meh) and I raved about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (she didn’t even get halfway through it).  With our readers, each and every person has a different literary aesthetic: how can we make everyone happy?

We can’t.  Which is why the emails, letters, posts, and comments we receive are so valuable.  It’s great to hear how much Rachel Riederer’s essay “Patient” affected you.  Or M.C. Armstrong’s moving essay about Ken Kesey.  Or how engaging Fiona McFarlane’s prize-winning story “Exotic Animal Medicine” was to read.  All of which are just a few of the pieces that I’ve heard wonderful things about during the last few weeks.  The editors of literary magazines and the writers of all those stories, essays, and poems really need to hear from our audience.  These things aren’t being written and then printed to be stuffed in the back of a desk.  They demand to be read, and when they engage you, we want to hear from you.  We need to be reminded how much it matters to you.  Because discovering the literature that engages and moves our audience is the most important thing we do.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

But what really gets me is the opening paragraph.

I love how much we learn about these two characters without ever being told explicitly. But I especially love how what looks at first like a relatively straightforward paragraph of summary is actually a series of small mysteries that raise key questions in the reader’s mind, questions that make us want to keep reading. (The footnotes are mine.)

On his way west¹ McRae picked up a hitcher, a young woman carrying a paper bag² and a leather purse, wearing jeans and a shawl—which she didn’t take off, though it was more than ninety degrees out and McRae had no air-conditioning.³ He was driving an old Dodge Charger with a bad exhaust system and one long crack in the wraparound windshield.⁴ He pulled over for her, and she got right in⁵, put the leather purse on the seat between them, and settled herself with a paper bag on her lap between her hands.⁶ He had just crossed into Texas from Oklahoma.⁷ This was the third day of the trip.

(From The Stories of Richard Bausch. Copyright 2003 by Richard Bausch)

1. Why is McRae heading West? And what, specifically, is his destination?
2. Um, what’s in the bag?
3. Why won’t she take off her shawl? Also, McRae must not have a lot of money.
4. Yep. These details confirm that he’s pretty broke, which makes his road-trip that much more interesting and tinged with desperation. (And as anyone who’s ever driven a car with a large crack in the windshield knows, this is a precarious situation: the windshield could shatter at any moment!)
5. The woman shows no hesitancy at all. No fear.
6. Seriously, what’s in the paper bag? It’s been mentioned twice already. She sure is protective of it. Must be important.
7. Oklahoma? He still has a ways to go. Perhaps this doesn’t bode well…

That’s a lot of work for one paragraph—especially one that reads like no work at all.

Any favorite story openings?

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time, forthcoming in February 2011 from Press 53. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.

1) You work as a project manager for New York State.  Do you ever find yourself bringing experiences from your daily job into your writing?
For the most part, no.  Work is work and fiction is fiction and never the twain shall meet.  Well, never say never.  I did write one story called “Building 8″ the protagonist of which is a career bureaucrat, and which takes place in the infamously “sick” title building, a building based, incidentally, on a real state office building here in Albany.  The story is a wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny parody of bureaucracy, but unfortunately I’m the only one it seems to make laugh out loud.  It remains, as of this date, unpublished, though full of hope.

2) What have you been reading/spending your time with most lately?
My full-time job, which, as the term “full-time” might imply, occupies at least part of my time.  When I’m not there, or writing or sleeping, I’m often reading historical novels.  I try to read what I’m writing.  For the last decade or so, when I was writing short stories exclusively, I was reading nothing but short stories.  I seldom read collections (Alice Munro and George Saunders being the glorious exceptions); on the theory that if you want to write your best you should read the best, I read the prize anthologies for the most part – O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Stories.  As a matter of fact, I collect the latter as a hobby; I probably have 75% of all the volumes published since they were inaugurated in 1915, and I’m hoping they’ll rub off.  With hard work and perseverance I hope to someday be included in Good American Short Stories, then work my way up to Better American Short Stories.  I think Best is probably too much to hope for at my age.

3) You’ve just published your first collection of stories, Hart’s Grove. What did you find to be the most exciting part of the process?
Without question, the most exciting part is the launching of the book after all the hum-drum hard work and tedium is done.  Any writer who says otherwise is either lying or a fool.  Of course, I suppose he or she could be both, a lying fool.  Or a foolish liar.  At any rate, after years of laboring in rejection and obscurity, never sure if your little collection of letters and syllables will ever see the light of day, the bright sunshine of the limelight is pretty irresistible, not to mention metaphorically mixed.  I could get used to champagne, adoration, and applause if I weren’t so humble.

4) What are you working on now?

I’m writing a historical novel right now.  The protagonist is a young doctor in the year 1857 in, of all places, Hart’s Grove, Pennsylvania.  It’s based on one of my Hart’s Grove stories (which is not included in the collection) and I’ve written over 200 pages.  Some wonderful writing there, if I do say so myself, chock full of terrific characters, snappy dialog, beautiful settings.  But, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m probably going to need a plot as well, so it could be a while yet.

Andrea Waterfield is a summer intern with The Missouri Review.

It took me several days to realize that the dream might have been a visual representation of an anxiety. The evening before the dream I had been listening to an interview on NPR with Bob Stein, a director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, in which Stein claimed that not far down the road, the print book would be obsolete. We’re in a moment of transition, he said, “from the book to whatever is going to become more important than it.” (My emphasis).

With the release of the iPad in April and with improvements to the Kindle appearing later this month, there’s been a good bit of discussion out there lately about the move from print publishing to electronic formats—though I don’t think I had heard that transition described in such absolute terms before listening to this interview. Perhaps it’s the assumption behind Stein’s claims that disturb me the most. I understand, of course, the benefits of going paperless: it’s more economical for publishers, it’s better for the environment, it’s more portable, yada yada. The reasons are all very practical. But since when do practicality and higher profit margins add up to “more important?”

Call me a traditionalist, but to me the loss of the book would be more than the loss of a cumbersome, costly, “wasteful” object. Isn’t the book-as-object, its heft and smell, the tooth and weight of its pages, an important part of the experience of reading? Yes, the book delivers content—information—but to the book lover, reading is also an aesthetic experience. The Kindle and its like are essentially invisible media, designed to perform a function without calling attention to themselves. Many books, on the other hand, are designed to be noticed. As a poet, I appreciate the fact that the way the poem looks on the page is just as integral to the poem as the music of the words or the rhythms of its stresses and syllables. The pleasure of the poem is an experience of the eyes, just as it is an experience of the ear and the imagination. There’s an element of this to prose, as well.

Additionally, the book-as-object is an artifact. As a kid, I used to love to explore the books my parents had stacked around the house. Sometimes I’d find funny marginalia, inscriptions from old high school sweethearts, newspaper articles or photographs stuck between the pages as temporary bookmarks and then forgotten. I’ve learned quite a lot about my parents from the books they’ve kept. Just a few weeks ago, on a visit home, I came across a copy of Leaves of Grass that had belonged to my great-grandfather. I’d had no idea my great-grandfather read poetry. That book is a treasure to me. I highly doubt that three generations from now someone will find my Kindle and treasure it. Technology is disposable. Technology is sterile, impersonal.

I have a tendency, perhaps unfairly, to connect a lot of American cultural strangeness to our Puritan roots. Why, for instance, are we uniquely obsessed with sanitation: bleach-based cleaners, disinfectants, odorlessness? Undoubtedly because some of our earliest settlers believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. The infatuation with the electronic book is another one I’m adding to the list. The Puritans forbade embellishment and imagery in their places of worship because they feared that churchgoers would venerate the object as holy, forgetting that it was merely a symbol of the divine. In American culture, when it comes to a contest of function and form, function seems to win out nearly every time. The Kindle is economical and efficient. It is not beautiful. If you see the book as a mere medium to convey information, then obviously this doesn’t matter.