Chew (Or, how to eat a book)

When I was very little, I learnt how to read silently. Even got in trouble for it. See, we didn't have much of a library at school, but we had a "library period" - A 45-minute stretch of time where a group of fidgety 8-year-olds were expected to sit still and mumble from whichever book had been handed to them. Not because they loved it, but because "Library sir" would whack them between the shoulder blades with a freshly plucked switch if they didn’t. This wasn't meant to foster a love for reading, it was meant to keep us relatively quiet and scared; Which would describe a LOT of our classes, now that I think about it. But I digress.

My mother taught me how to read silently. It was the mark of culture, she said, to not move his lips when he read. So as I sat on the scratched, brown bench, hunched over my Blyton with no cover and ripped pages, lips unmoving, it must have seemed like I was staring, rather than reading. a classmate noticed, and keenly felt the unfairness of it all – him having to slog through books while I just sat there, in bliss, not absorbing ANY of the painful words into my brain. A teacher was summoned. The complaint was succinct. "He isn't reading. His lips aren't moving". I got away with it because, let's face it, as the only one in my class who snuck into the library rather than the football field during recess, it wasn't really believable that I wouldn't be reading. But I have always felt faintly smug about the incident, long after I had any right to be of such childish gotchas.

And then, I discovered, I was wrong. My mother was wrong. One day, I discovered the joys of reading out loud.

I blame Pratchett. The quality of his prose made me realize that it wasn’t enough to just read the words, that I wouldn’t be satisfied if I couldn’t feel them in a tangible manner. I needed to experience them through as many senses as I could, not just one. Hearing them, and yes, even speaking them out loud, feeling my lips and tongue and teeth perform the intricate symphony of storytelling the author had left there for me was a more complete experience, enveloping me and drawing me deeper into the world that had been weaved into my soul.

There is something solid about words. They aren’t simply vibrations in the air, or pixels on the screen, or curvy little blobs of ink on paper. They live, they breathe, and if I wanted them properly, I had to savour them. To say them out loud, to chew them, to bite, gnaw and nibble them until they felt real, in my mouth. I developed this system of “chewing” a story, where I don’t just read it out loud. I do the voices, I put on accents, I do characters. In short, I do my damndest to sound like a bad radio play, over-inflecting every word, suitability be damned. Does it slow down the process of reading? Certainly, but at the end of the day, it can’t possibly be about reading more than the other guy.

I don’t advocate reading whole books this way, of course. Not every word, not every passage, not every page or chapter is there to envelope you in. Some of them are there just to take you from the really good bits, and if you are lucky, the good bits are close by. But when you get to them, you will know. You will feel the familiar pinpricks of your hair standing on their end all along your arm, you will feel that tiny tingle in the back of your neck that tells you something special is going on. Your lips will part, your breath will pause, and somewhere in the deepest recesses of your animal brain, synapses will crackle with a little more fire. And when that happens, it doesn’t matter whether you are tucked into your bed with a book and a flashlight, or if you are in the metro, hanging onto the strap with one hand while you flick across your smartphones with the other, verbalize. Read it out loud. Trust me, eating your words never felt so damn good.

Plastic Pleasures

“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”  ― Douglas Adams

To many of us who love books, the printing press may be the greatest scientific achievement of all time. I mean, sure, without fire we wouldn’t have pizza and without the wheel there wouldn’t be a way to deliver pizza, but what is the point of a piping hot one with extra cheese if I don’t have a book to read while I absently shove slices in my mouth? Ok, that’s it with the pizza references, but the point of this is to say that people really, really, really love printed books.

And why wouldn’t they? First of all, it’s been around for a long time. It’s how we define books. It’s how our grandparents defined books. It’s how THEIR grandparents defined books, meandering back to the 1400s. Printed books are there in our bones, because they haven’t really changed in so long. We didn’t have any problem going from vinyl records, to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3, and that happened within a couple of generations. Nor do we yearn for when watching a movie at home meant lugging out the VCR and running to the video library three blocks away for a video tape that was just as likely to get wrapped up in the inner workings of the player as it was to provide an evening’s entertainment. Our music is digital, our movies are digital, our games are digital, so why do so many intelligent, reasonable people begin frothing at the mouth when the discussion turns to our books being digital?

Because they’re not wrong. There’s something about holding a book, about running ones fingers across the spine, about opening up a random page and glancing over the words. We don’t just read books. We feel books, and smell books, and touch books and sometimes, if the books are called 50 Shades of Gray, we throw books across the room in rage, but that’s neither here nor there. Books are warm and colourful and voluminous (literally). A stacked bookshelf, ceiling high, is a better adornment for any room than the world’s most expensive wallpaper. When choosing between digital and printed, the battle always comes down to aesthetics vs. practicality. And that’s the point of this post. To discover and discuss the aesthetic joys of digital.

It’s wise to remember that even the printing press was created out of a need for practicality. Books were the best way to codify and spread knowledge and information, but it was impossible to do that with the gigantic handwritten volumes of the day. The point was to speed up the process of making copies, not provide aesthetic joys. That came later, and it came because the size, shape and feel of a book became associated with memories. Practicality followed aesthetic pleasure. Hell, I bet someone complained when this newfangled thing called paper came in and made the “carvings on stone slabs” technology obsolete. This is what makes me sure that readers a few generations henceforth will find things to love about ereaders and digital books just the way we love printed volumes. The question is, what will they love?

Will they love the fact that going on vacation doesn’t mean having to choose only five of the fifteen or so books they will be reading over the next few weeks? Will they be thrilled by the way the ebook reader glows in the night…a luminous square of literature in the dark, and the rest of the world forgotten? Or will they delight in the fact that no book will go out of print. Ever.  Will they appreciate how wondrous it is that ancient philosophical texts and the latest prize winning fiction is available to them instantly? I do. It’s a thrill, a tingle in the base of my spine that I can only call an aesthetic pleasure. One that goes beyond the realm of the physical object and is almost, dare I say, magical? Yes, I recognize the aesthetic pleasures of a printed book. It’s why I have hundreds and celebrate the book fair as my own personal Christmas. But I also derive a different kind of aesthetic pleasure from a digital book. Fittingly, this is based on less tangible things, and more virtual, but it’s aesthetic no doubt, going beyond the realm of the words on the glowing screen. It’s the pleasure of more worlds to explore, more ideas to discover and more things to learn than I ever could, if I just stuck one way of thinking. Besides, printed books are not going away anytime soon, if ever. After all, we’ll always have 50 shades, and throwing my Kindle across the room get’s real expensive, real quick.

Terry Pratchett

The trouble with heroes is that up close, they disappoint. It was simpler when we didn’t know them. Before the internet. Before message boards and reddit AMAs. There was an innocence to fandom that was too good to last, really. With every new quote, revelation and news report it eroded and heroes fell. Steve Jobs turned out to be a man who had refused to acknowledge his own daughter. Gandhi was a terrible father and a man with strange fetishes. Cliff Richard’s acting was the stuff nightmares were made of. Heroes failed. Heroes disappointed. Heroes crumbled until you stopped believing in heroes. Apparently, that was when you “grew up”.

When I picked out the colourful paperback so many years ago and bought it based on its admittedly strange and somewhat incomprehensible blurb, I wasn’t looking for heroes. Honest. I was looking for a good book, a diversion for a couple of days. What I got was not one, but two heroes, a whole universe to explore, and a cult to call my own. I forget how much the volume cost me, but it was cheap at any price.

My first hero lay within the pages of the book. "His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Samuel Vimes”, as he hates to be known as, is the man I wish I was. An authority figure who is anti-authoritarian, a man of intelligence who is smart enough to know where his intelligence ends, and a self-proclaimed “bastard” who is anything but. He’s practically zen, if zen spoke softly (on occasion, most notably when the baby was in bed), and carried a big truncheon. That’s not an euphemism.

The other “hero”, I took slightly longer to discover. His name was Terry Pratchett. He had a beard as white as Santa, but a red sack could never hold the innumerable treasures Terry carried inside his black fedora. Magician? Pffft! Magicians pulled rabbits out of hats. Terry pulled out a cosmic, spacefaring turtle bearing four elephants and an entire world on its pockmarked shell.

I devoured Pratchett. I explored Discworld, and over the course of 40 books, got to know its nooks, crannies, mountains, rivers, cities and villages better than I knew the way to my own kitchen. And believe you me, I knew the way to my own kitchen. Even now, when i close my eyes, I see the sludgy waters of the River Ankh, more solid than liquid, the only body of flowing water that supports its own fauna. I see the Ramtop mountains as they disappear into the clouds, and I know of the gods who live there. Not pretend, make-believe gods like in another, more spherical planet far away, but real gods who play with lives of men and women  (and trolls, and dwarfs and warewolves, and vampires, and golems. Well, not really golems, because golems are fireproof and thus, immune to smiting). I see the kingdom bathed in the greenish-yellow-purple hue of octarine, the most magical colour of the spectrum. And of course, I see the gushing waters of the Rimworld oceans spilling into the vastness of space, where they are magically transported back, ensuring the cycle never ends.

Terry Pratchett passed away in March. It’s taken me this long to write about it, because honestly, it still feels unreal. Strange that I won’t be reading a new Discworld novel every year like clockwork. It’s hard to accept that, because as heroes go, Terry was untouchable. I’d read up on him, preparing myself for the inevitable crash. Some skeleton in the closet that was the counterpoint to his genius. Some comment that proved his bigotry. There were none. To the end, he was the admirable, outspoken, acerbic, slightly cranky and whip-smart man I knew him to be. He was my hero, the only one I had in an adulthood teeming with cynicism and fallen angels, and suddenly, he’s gone.

Death had been coming to Terry for some time now, ever since his Alzheimer's was discovered in 2007. But then again, Death was everywhere in Terry’s rip-roaringly funny world. He  was more than a motif - he was its most prolific player; the ONLY character, in fact, to feature in every single Discworld novel. As Terry put it, he wasn’t afraid of Death because, as the man who made Death famous, Death OWED him. So when Terry took his hand and disappeared across the black desert, far, far into the horizon under the starless sky, as devastating as it was for me, as heartbreaking as it was, I could not be angry. I cannot be angry. All I can do is sit at my keyboard, flex my strained fingers and tap tap tap type away, creating teeny tiny sparks of octarine magic, in the glow of Terry’s roaring bonfire.