“The typical civilized man is an exhausted, spiritually hysterical man because he has no idea of what it means . . . to face calmly with his whole life a great book,” wrote Gerald Stanley Lee in “The Lost Art of Reading,” his lament of the distracted, harried state of modern life as he saw it when his essay was published—in 1902.
As Leah Price observes in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books,” “The history of reading is also a history of worrying.” Her book is a witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature, exemplified by valedictions like Sven Birkerts’s “The Gutenberg Elegies” or—forgive the echo—“The Lost Art of Reading,” by David L. Ulin. Ms. Price teaches a course on book history at Rutgers University, and her aim is to demystify the practice of reading by considering it within the context of changing eras. However different the technology, from the earliest leather-bound codex to mass-market paperbacks to e-readers, she finds that two things remain constant: Reading has always been an improvised, free-for-all activity, and there have always been cultural overseers tut-tutting about the ways that people do it wrong.
