Jennifer Howard

When you look at this picture, what do you see? People reading, yes. Are they reading together or alone? I get a sense of alone-together from this group. Each is absorbed in his reading but it's a companionable solitude, or so it looks to me.

In a sense, though, every reader is always a solitary reader. A good book generates a force field that keeps the world out, whether you're on a park bench or in a library or in Grand Central Station. That's part of the fun, yes? At least it is for me. When I read, I don't feel alone, even if there's no-one else nearby. The book is with me; the author or narrator, the characters, the setting keep me company. It's hard to be lonely. And yet I am delightfully alone when I read, no matter where I am. It's a private world.

Enter social reading, enabled by online platforms like Social Book, created by the Institute for the Future of the Book. If I don't want to be alone when I read--if I want to share my thoughts and reactions with other readers--I can get online and talk to them around the text itself. In theory, anyway, readers can have company wherever we are, as long as we can get online. We don't have to be sharing a park bench to read together. We can find company in the margins--if we want to. More on that in a minute.

I recently wrote a column about a neat Social Book pilot project, the Open Utopia, which invites the world to comment on and even rewrite Thomas More's 16th-century classic ("With 'Social Reading,' Books Become Places to Meet," CHE, Nov. 26, 2012). I talked to professors who are experimenting with social reading in their classrooms, with some success. They say that social reading draws students into assigned reading and generates a lot of discussion--sometimes too much. As I say in the article, though, too much discussion is not really a bad problem to have. It's certainly better than the dull disengagement and the glassy-eyed stare of the bored student.

I expect to see social reading take off in classrooms. It seems like a natural there. Will it catch on with us solitary types reading on park benches, in train stations, in our living rooms? I'm not sure I want more company when I read. But I will try to make room on the bench.

Image Source(s):

“Reading group, Covent Garden by Flickr user
Allan Rostron. Used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating little story, tucked into the Style section, about some bookstores refusing to shelve books produced by Amazon. The boycotters include Washington’s own indie stalwart, Politics & Prose. If I go to P&P, I won’t find a copy of what sounds like a charming new novel, Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles. The Post article says, They don’t want to promote what they see as a predatory publisher. “Care of Wooden Floors” was issued this month by New Harvest, a new collaboration between Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the arch-nemesis of brick-and-mortar bookstores: Amazon. According… Read more...

One of the latest books to find its way into my house is Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, a collection of his lyrics fortified with anecdotes and commentary and thoughts about writing. For Sondheim, that means writing songs, of course, but right off the bat he lays out some guidelines that almost any kind of writer ought to be thinking about: There are only three principles necessary for a lyric writer, all of them familiar truisms. They were not immediately apparent to me when I started writing, but have come into focus via Oscar Hammerstein’s tutoring, Strunk and White’s huge… Read more...

I wasn’t going to write any more about Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men. I already had my say. But the book and the response to it has got me thinking about what counts as a Big Book. Consider this a postscript to my WaPo review. If you follow bookish or pop-culture chatter at all, the book’s has been hard to escape. It’s everywhere, and by “everywhere” I mean all over the pages (virtual or otherwise) of the country’s high-profile cultural outlets. It’s been challenged on the front of The New York Times Book Review, while David Brooks… Read more...

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid: the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, Anne McCaffery’s Pern books, lots of C.S. Lewis (even The Screwtape Letters, oddly enough) and Tolkien (everything except The Silmarillion, although I tried). I read A Wrinkle in Time, although something about it rubbed me the wrong way. I’ll probably have to re-read it to figure out what, exactly. SF in book form I mostly missed until later, though. Maybe because I was a girl growing up when I did, nobody pointed me… Read more...

I have never seen the movie “Life Is Beautiful.” I haven’t seen it because when it came out, everybody, and I do mean everybody, told me I had to see it, that it was too good to miss. Maybe it is. All these years later, I’m still not inclined to find out. The critical collective spoke too loudly. My spouse and I call this the “Life Is Beautiful” problem. It applies to books as well. I thought about this recently while reading novelist Michael Cunningham’s two-part “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury” in the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. You might… Read more...

"For Many Students, Print Is Still King"

Jan. 28, 2013, The Chronicle of Higher Education,

"Missing Ears" (on "Stylish Academic Writing" by Helen Sword)

TLS, Dec. 21 & 28, 2012 (subscription), Journalism

"The 'Alt-Ac' Track: Careers Without Tenure"

Jan. 6, 2013, The Chroncle of Higher Education, Journalism