19 May 2014
I'm tired of reading about the death of the book. It's not true, in the first place, and in the second, it's a lazy signifier, a way of addressing cultural import (or risk) that's not really justified.
Take Will Self's essay this past weekend in the Guardian. Titled "The Novel Is Dead (This Time It's for Real)," it uses a conversation the author had recently with his teenage son as a starting point for a meditation on the futility of long-form fiction in a world of tweets and bytes.
As it happens, I'm sympathetic to Self's method - my book "The Lost Art of Reading" is built around a similar device. But I also think his argument is shopworn: secondhand and not particularly apropos.
