Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He’s also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He’s the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

Watch this space…

Phil and I discussed the likelihood of the end of the world before breakfast on Wednesday morning. What if the CERN scientists were wrong and the collider bang did cause a new cosmos to burst out of the ruins of our old one? And what if that kept happening over and over again in a weird 14 billion year loop? We get this far and they say nothing much’ll happen and then they collide the particles and BANG! Up we go again. 

I waited around until 8.00am (when Phil assured me it had happened ‘and everything seems ok.’) Then I set off for The Reader Organisation office, listening, en route, to the Today programme on Radio 4 where (after we heard of the Cabinet having been to Birmingham: wonders, wonders, signs and wonders) we got Andrew Marr in the Control Room at CERN. It was a magnificent piece of radio. Everything seemed so very tentative yet also mildly possible, like the early days of Tim Henman’s Wimbledon career. Something just might be about to happen: something for which we have been waiting for thirty years. We were all cheering. But we realised, too, in our hearts, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But then perhaps it might. Let’s cheer. Let’s hope it will. Let’s hope. The scientists (as they each spoke they turned out to be a wonderful mix of Ulster, Welsh, English and French) might just manage to bring off what was being billed as the most important scientific experiment since the early Apollo programme.

Which was what it reminded me of as I sat in my traffic jam and listened. Did I really sit on a parquet floor in a primary school assembly hall with 200 other under-11’s and watch ‘one small step for man…?’  I think I did but it is all so long ago… Life is long. And very short. I listened to what Marr called ‘the atmosphere so tense you could it with a … laser beam’ and I could see the grainy black and white pictures, and hear my grandfather mocking ‘It’s all in a studio! The Yanks have mocked it up! It’s anti-Communist propaganda!’

Later Andrew Marr wondered if Big Bang day would get kids fired up about physics. I think, despite my grandfather’s perfectly reasonable doubts, that it was the Apollo programme that got me interested in Science Fiction. I couldn’t get interested in real science because of the maths or rather my paralysing fearful innumeracy but I did read John Wyndham aged about 11, finishing The Day of the Triffids by torchlight way into the night because I simply could not stop reading and then it went on: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg. Until at some point I got bored. Later, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. le Guin resurrected my old SF interest when, in my early twenties I went through a period of reading only women but after that I forgot all about my early love, until Doris Lessing introduced me (via ‘Some Remarks’ at the beginning of Shikasta) to the biggest daddy of all Sci Fi books: Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon. 

For Big Bang Day, Big Bang Week, Big Bang Year, this is the man to read. He is the biggest. Cosmology? Infinity?  He’s got it by the billion squared. He tells our human story from the primordial soup days to the way past the end of the our universe, and many other universes.

But he doesn’t think of it as Science Fiction, just fiction. In the Preface to the 1930 edition, Stapledon writes:

This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

…The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

‘The human race in its cosmic setting.’ I loved that – the enormous size of it.  

It was an amazingly lucky stroke for me as a young post-grad to discover that Olaf Stapledon–despite his exotic northern name–had been a lecturer in the Extension Studies programme at the University of Liverpool. Not only that, but all his papers had been donated to our very own Sydney Jones Library. Not only that, but they had not (I’m talking 1983) yet been catalogued. Not only that, but when I arrived breathless with excitement in SJL Special Collections, some of them hadn’t even been lifted out of the original, dusty, old cardboard boxes Olaf himself (probably) packed them into before carrying up to his attic. Some of the boxes had string round them. I undid it, thinking: he tied this careful knot.

Reading through that stuff (almost all of it totally unrelated to my PhD thesis) was an experience of immense magnitude. It was like getting involved with a ghost. There he was–everywhere and in all sorts of ways–but I couldn’t see him or touch him, though I could sense him, feel him and hear him but then I couldn’t quite feel him or hear him. Yet he was in my mind. I knew him. 

One day I found a letter, hand typed on one of those old sit up and beg typewriters, from H. G. Wells, and there was H. G. Wells’ signature in heavy ink, and (as I remember it) it was a kind letter, praising (was it? My memory isn’t too good) Last and First Men but not praising it with huge generosity and, I think, a little egotistically drawing Stapledon’s attention to something Wells had himself recently published or written. I remember it as being on hotel notepaper. It was a wonderful moment, holding it, with the box in front of me, and no one telling me not to touch it. Two great giants of Sci Fi seemed before my eyes. Yes, I think I saw them. Both dead, they were in some sense present. 

There’s an awful lot we can’t see. Think of all that dark matter: we don’t even know what it is, only that it is most of what’s here. Three cheers for the particle colliders then and for more people taking ‘A-level’ physics. They are going bring a little more of that darkness into the light.

Posted by Jane Davis

Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”

The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Something is happening to the way we read and it’s happening very quickly, but the possibilities are opening up, not closing down. Why fetishise the physical book when we can read aloud, or be read to, read online, on our phones, or on our ebook reading devices (NB. you need a better name for those, chaps)? The books won’t stop working just because we start using other technologies and in fact as demand for physical books declines the quality of them as objects may well improve–apocalyptic booksniffers rejoice! Naomi Alderman in her piece in the Observer even suggests that new reading technologies will lead to new literary forms. I think she’s right about that, even if, for the time being, the technology is still as clunky as my tape player in 1985.

Posted by Chris Routledge

As might be expected the most vocal commentators on the report have been from the opposition parties, notably Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary. I have quite a lot of time for Gove, whose witty enthusiasm for the arts makes him an entertaining reviewer. The Conservatives have made a big play of this decline in reading, but their response, which mixes up reading as an activity with reading as a skill, misses the point entirely. Here’s Michael Gove:

We are falling dangerously behind other countries and we know that those from the poorest backgrounds are suffering most. It’s time the government stopped blaming parents and accepted the case we’ve been making for a new focus on teaching reading using tried and tested methods, with a test after two years in primary school to ensure our children are being taught properly.

What he’s talking about here is literacy as a skill; something employers like and which affects our economy and competitiveness. But ‘tried and tested methods’ do not make passionate readers or smart, well-informed citizens. They may well produce people who can read, but only in the sense that people need to learn the tried and tested methods for tying their shoelaces.

What is needed is not more testing and key stage whatevers, but teachers and parents and politicians who care about reading and want to show how great and how modern it can be. How it fits in with the other things in childrens’ lives. The current report pits books against computer games as if they were somehow in competition. In reality they are not but many readers–teachers, politicians, worried parents–have failed to see that pleasure in reading does not preclude pleasure in other things. In some contexts the computer game, rather than the book, might be just what you need.

Here’s what I mean. At a Reader Food For Thought event a year or so ago I was seated with a secondary school teacher, who complained with some force that her students did nothing but play computer games and were not interested in reading. I asked her what they were playing and she told me that she didn’t use computers and that she didn’t care what they were playing. That’s a mistake. Of all people teachers should understand what students are doing, even if they don’t like it themselves. When children see reading as less worthwhile than gaming, lashing out at gaming is not going to make the kids put down their Wii. We need to make the case for books, not against computers.

I for one would like to see Britain become world champion nation at sitting in an armchair reading big miserable books. But the Opposition plan to focus on the method rather than the excitement of reading will do nothing to change a national attitude that goes against reading as something worth doing. Of course there is nothing wrong with improving the teaching of reading in schools, but going easy on parents is only useful as a vote winner. I was talking to an affluent, educated woman about children and television the other day. She said to me ‘Thank God for TV: without it you’d have to read boring books to your kids all the time.’ That’s what we’re up against and testing at six ain’t going to fix it.

Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

The people who like ebooks most of all are publishers. They are much cheaper to produce than the real thing and if you load them up with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) software you can sell the same file to the same person several times over. Over the last few years there have been signs that publishers have been losing control of the distribution channels. Self-publishing is growing fast and just as bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have been able to escape the grip of their record companies, so the day is fast approaching when writers will want to do the same. Deals with companies like Amazon help lock the new digital distribution channel to the major players and offer the chance to control it.

But what I worry about most when it comes to the relationship between book publishers and the makers of devices like this is the future. If books become something to be stored and deleted, or sold with a limited life expectancy, available only for a while before they vanish, or dependent on an Internet connection, or something that is updated as circumstances change, what will the future know of us? What will the future know?

In a terrific post on the future of the book (via BoingBoing) Mark Pilgrim quotes Orwell:

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

I like devices like the Kindle. I think they are a great addition to the ways of reading we already have. But I hope this isn’t the only way books are published in the future. In the Spring I am going to be teaching a class on Fahrenheit 451. I’m afraid my memory isn’t good enough to make a good revolutionary.

Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

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Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

Over at January Magazine Linda L. Richards has a thoughtful piece on how reading is changing and how despite all predictions, the book isn’t going away just yet:

Since the dawn of the electronic age, people have been talking about the death of the book. After all the book was designed centuries ago. It is a musty idea. Archaic. How is it possible it’s lasted even this long? Here we have electronic options. Hyperlinked hypertext accessible in hyperspace. Smooth, streamlined, you feel au courant just thinking about it. How can a musty old book compete with any of that?

And yet, here we are, fully 25 years beyond the point where I first heard someone forecast the death of the book. The book in traditional form survives — nay thrives — because it works. It’s a good design. It’s practical.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

All you have to do is enter the title and/or the author of a book you’ve just read and enjoyed and the database makes suggestions based on other users’ reading lists. You can use it without registering (entering Catch-22 came up with Bernard Malamud’s The Natural among several other things) but the real benefit comes when you register and build a reading list of your own. That way the database can develop according to your tastes.

Here’s the link again.

Posted by Chris Routledge

It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press, and for the past five years Google has been at work on an ambitious project, Google Book Search. Google’s self-described aim is to “build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world,” one that would enable readers to search the list of books it contains and to see full texts of those not covered by copyright.

Still, despite the pace of the digitization process the experience of screen reading and paper reading are different and it seems to me that the real revolution is not going to be one in which pixels replace print, but a working out what each does best. If I want to search, then Google, Yahoo and the rest have pushed old-fashioned indexes off a cliff; if I want to read in the bath, I’ll take a paperback. And that is to say nothing of the feel of old books, the quality of digital copies, or of serendipity, a library’s greatest asset.

More responses to this article at Language Hat and Kenyon Review. Here’s the link to the article again.

Posted by Chris Routledge Powered by Qumana