Readings

By Sven Birkerts

Readings combines the best of Sven Birkerts's previously published criticism with vital new essays. A dazzling writer whose clarity, rigor, and far-flung intellectual curiosity have been widely praised, Birkerts the literary critic is in top form in these pages. Whether discussing Elizabeth Bishop or Don DeLillo, Rilke or Kerouac, Keats or The Great Gatsby, he brings fresh insight, sharp thinking, and reflective sensitivity to each of his subjects.

A brilliant cultural commentator, Birkerts also addresses broader, more associative topics, such as biography and the enigma of poetic inspiration, contemporary nostalgia, our modern sense of time, and the future of the creative spirit. As Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, "Birkerts on reading fiction is like M.F.K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it." This is writing about reading at its best.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555972837
• ISBN13: 9781555972837
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Thought provoking/ pessimistic view of the future of reading

In Sven Birkerts' latest series of essays, "Readings" he insists that we are forgetting how to read because of the deluge of information that we have to process in our modern everyday world. And he doesn't mean this figuratively. He believes that we are actually changing and adapting to new media at the expense of the immersive reading experience. And that the rate of change is increasing. He notes that St. Agustine, in the third century was amazed at those who could read without moving their lips, suggesting that the internal processing of text was not an inherent human ability, but something that evolved within the last dozen centuries or so. Birkerts, who doesn't use a comuter to write, thinks that we are now taking another step, evolving out of the age of literature into something new and, as of yet, not fully understood (but assumed to be bad). He makes a good argument, but it seems to me that there are lots of hungry and discerning readers still out there, and many of them don't move their lips when they read. I agree with Birkerts that something is happening, but I'm not as pessimistic, I guess. (And maybe it's not the reading experience, but writing that electronica is negativly impacting, as this computer keyboard generated review would attest)But read this book. It contains much more that it's central theme would suggest, on topics ranging from Seamus Heaney to Don Dillio. It is a very engaging, valuable and thought provoking book.