Books: Reading is Fundamental

“The post–Gutenberg world was revolutionized by the advent of the printed book.” Understanding the Media, your optional online text, page 89.

Image is 1940s Paperback from Amazon.com. Paperbacks in the 20th century made books less expensive and less durable. Today, books are also available as electronic e-files. But the most long-lasting book format is the so-called "hardback," or book with a hard cover.

(This post is required reading material for CO 140, a class I am teaching this spring, but y'all are invited to read this text for that class for free. You're welcome.)

Books are the first mass medium we turn our attention to because of their foundational nature. By this, I mean both they are the historic root of all mass media, and they still today remain an important foundation of content in the larger media world. Think of how many movies, online or network TV shows, are based on books.

Literature began orally, with poems and plays, but those literary ideas only became fixed when scribes started to, well, scribe. The first books in our culture date to around 3,000 BC, when Egyptians began writing book-length papyrus scrolls. Printing was invented by the Chinese around 700 AD, and in Europe, really took off after Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type for use on the press in 1488.

Books had originally been hand-written, and when scribes or monks had to transcribe them, they developed into elaborate works of art as well as texts.

But when books became more common, culture was shifted in multiple ways:

• 

  Johannes Gutenberg
  from Wikimedia Commons.
  

  Both the Renaissance and Reformation, revolutions in in knowledge and religions that fueled dramatic social upheavals, were indirectly caused by the spread of subversive ideas in book form.

• Our modern sense of “childhood” and “education” are largely tied to a culture that valued literacy, partly for economic reasons. A factory mechanic is a more valuable employee if he can read the manual that came with the steam engine (or, these days, the robot).

• While media content comes from many sources, the most recognized media tropes, stereotypes and characters first came to us in book form. Think of “Lord of the Rings” or Harry Potter. These days, nonfiction books still have political influence. As we noted earlier in media history, this country was partly created due to a booklet called “Common Sense.” The Civil War was foreshadowed by the cultural rift exposed in “Uncle Toms Cabin.” Former President Donald Trumps first impeachment was partly the result of the “Mueller Report,” a special counsel government report available in book form.

It is sometimes stated that we live in a “post literate” world—that the educational revolution caused by Gutenberg is being terminated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, TicToc and YouTube.

That’s bogus, for many reasons. While it’s true that it’s a cultural problem literacy is not as “popular” as it once was—readership of all print media struggle, it’s difficult at Mount Mercy to encourage many people to glance at even brief printed works such as a 6-page edition of “The Mount Mercy Times.” Yet, in my experience, the brightest people I know are all “book” people. Sure, some book readers can be introverted nerds and retreat to books to get away—but think of how book-oriented almost all of your professors are. I grew up in a screen generation too, even if the screen of my youth was the television set. Anybody who has an advanced degree has come to terms with the need to both extract meaning from, and to produce, long text forms.

Even today, several MMU students are “book people,” and mostly they are among the best students I know. To an important degree, anybody seeking a university degree is learning the writing of their chose discipline—and the best and most effective writers are all book readers.

I think many ideas—both fictional and journalistic—are best expressed in book form. Books are a linear text medium that reflects sequential thought. That many people today don’t read means that many people don’t engage in deep thinking, because deep thought is cumulative, orderly, sequential—bookish.

If you want a healthy body, you have to both be lucky—we don’t control our DNA nor our environment—but also exercise and eat right. If you want a healthy brain, you face the same issues. I hope your DNA and the MMU environment foster and improve your thinking ability. But exercising your brain and gaining depth of knowledge still requires that you cultivate that brain by engaging in sustained mental work. In short, read a book.

How to be smart, part 1 of the How to Live series. Be like her. Read. Woman floats in Dead Sea, Wikimedia Commons image by Patrik Neckman.

And books that we enjoyed when we were young often form touchstones of our lives. Just as music we loved as a young adult partly becomes our personal soundtrack, the book you didn't have to read but devoured early in life sticks with you, something I ruminated about in this blog post I wrote in 2015 which is also about "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

Over time, I’ve written about books now and then on my blogs. Here is a selection of some past posts:

• February 2019: The Enduring Power of Books (another post for this class).

• August 2019: Memoirs that Make Me Wonder on The Why of XY (about two books, one my a woman, one by a man, that explore what key women mean in the authors lives).

• November 2020: Val Verde: A Fake Reality in a Tale of Fake Reality (a post about Hank Green’s latest novel).

• June 2019: Memoir, Michelle Style (about Michelle Obama’s autobiography).

• December  2018: An Absolutely Remarkable Green Year (about Hank's first book, still my favorite).

• January 2018: Vlog Bro Writes Touching YA Novel (for some equal time, John Green enters this blog, too).
  

And even today, prominent YouTubers sometimes get together. Over a book:

The Enduring Power of Books

List made in class of books I and students thought had an impact on our lives. I think all date from when we were young--I read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" when I was maybe 12 or so.

This week in my Understanding Media class at Mount Mercy University, we’re discussing the enduring influence of books.

The class will look at the cultural impact of different mass media, and we start with oldest fixed medium. It’s arguably not the oldest of all media—cave paintings certainly have a few years on tomes, and what became written literature open existed as epic oral tales or poems. But books are an ancient medium, and one that is at the root of culture.

Empty shelves in Busse Library. Books are being moved around.

Many of our stories in other media are derived from novels or nonfiction books, and even comic books.

I argue to students that the reality is every communication career involves serious, professional writing—and all writers first have to be readers. Of course, you don’t have to regularly consume books to be a “reader,” but I think it makes a huge difference. A student who voluntarily wades through the longer form narrative that a book represents has to exert themselves in logical, linear thought. They stretch their minds, acquire more words and learn so see the world through the mind of another human.

Other media offers some of those experiences. A video series or movie can be a transformative narrative—but books articulate longer, more nuanced narratives and thought. They, books, exercise more of the imagination of the reader.

I've touched on books before on this blog--writing a post about books that meant something special  to me as I was growing up, and one a bit later on the death of Harper Lee. On my more general blog, in 2018, I wrote posts about books by John Green and Hank Green.

And here are more recent highlights of Joe’s bookish life—some of my reactions to books I’ve recently consumed:

“Dead Wake” by Erik Larson. I’m already a big Larson fan, his “Devil in the White City” may be about my favorite nonfiction book, and this book, which tells some of the stories behind the people who traveled on the Lusitania during its doomed final voyage, does not disappoint. Besides the passengers and crew of that ocean liner, the book also follows the crew of the German U-Boat whose single torpedo strike doomed so many to a watery death. I’m a sucker for well-told history, and Larson is one of our best story tellers. His world is the real one compellingly recreated—there are not many heroes or villains here, just people caught in the great web of history and chance.

“The Reckoning” by John Grisham. I’ve read a lot of Grisham books—and do recommend them—but to be honest, they sometimes leave me with mixed feelings. The sucker punch at the end of this book left me feeling a bit down, and I found, as I often do in Grisham novels, that I don’t seem to feel enough empathy for these characters. Still, it’s an interesting story that moves a bit slowly at first, but it does maneuver its characters into a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s not my favorite of the recent books I’ve read, but still one I recommend.

“The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. I am halfway through this book, and both interested and put off by it, in almost equal measure. It’s a provocative book, and while it makes many valid points, it also oversells some poor ideas. The authors insist, for example, that the “intention” of the senders is a key point when some verbal attack on a protected group is alleged—but, no. On the other hand, whether an expression is offensive is supposed to be given a “reasonable person” test, not a “sensitive person” test, and here is where many of the examples the authors cite go astray. I’m halfway through this book, and interested to read what the second half brings. I feel compelled to keep going despite qualms about these authors’ ideas—partly because I think reading an interesting nonfiction book that you disagree with is a healthy mental exercise. I think I would agree with the authors on one of their key ideas—a university should be a place where diverse ideas can be aired, and diversity of ideas is not always encouraged on American campuses. It remains to be seen what I’m thinking of this book after the second half.

As is often the case during a semester, my “to read” cue is a bit stacked up right now. Here are books I have on hand and plan to read—the "Toxin" one is another faculty reading selection, so it’s not a book I personally chose, but the others are. And the Storm Lake text was a Valentine’s Day gift from my sweetie, so it’s extra special. My current reading cue: