In Defense of Heavy Reading
March 19, 2012 By Peter Gutierrez 4 Comments
Massiveness: an overlooked benefit of J.K. Rowling's achievement. (Image © BrokenSphere /
Wikimedia Commons)
As anyone who has ever moved can attest, books are the heaviest known objects in the physical
universe. Indeed, it’s a well-known scientific fact that any five books packed into a small
cardboard box possess a molecular density greater than the business end of Thor’s hammer. If
you absentmindedly leave such a box on your back porch for more than two weeks it will, most
likely, self-compress into a block of coal.
And that’s why, I contend, books are not just vitally important, but always will be.
Oh, hold on please, I seem to have left something out here…
Let’s back up, then, to a point early in the second Clinton administration, and an incident that
prompted neither the first nor the last time that my wife would laugh at me. I was ordering some
interesting-looking hardcover volumes for our kids. Dinosaurs, creatures of the deep, that sort of
thing, rendered artfully with plenty of cutaway diagrams, pull-out triptychs, and so on. In short,
the books seemed educational and engaging, bursting with both information and wonder. The
only problem was, we didn’t yet have any kids.
“Why wait?” I offered.
So we ended up lugging those books, when they did arrive, from our small apartment to our first
house… to our second house… and then to our third house before the first of our children was
old enough to read them. And of course along for the ride were all the books we’d saved since
high school and college, plus a few we’d been given as children by our parents. I’m sure most of
you have first-hand familiarity with this scenario.
So, yes, there’s something special about a book all right. But lest you suspect this is turning into
another half-wistful, half-elegiac piece on the romance of cloth- and glue-bound printed material,
on how nothing will ever replicate the smell of fresh ink on fine paper—well, forget it. Despite
my personally being able to relate to such sentiments, we’ve all read more than enough of those
love letters to “old media” during the past decade.
Instead, I’d like to draw attention to the formal aspect of the medium referenced above, namely,
weight. Mass. Size. Cumbersomeness. Actually, you might even say that heftiness is an
“emergent” property because it’s certainly not something that’s mentioned in any standard
definition of the novel or book-length memoir.
Not that we don’t get “physicality” with other media, other platforms. Hand someone your
favorite VHS tape from 1984, and you are apt to get a big smile from the sheer kitschiness of the
gesture. Hand someone your absolutely most favorite CD-ROM from 1992, and they are apt to
hand it back to you. But if someone hands you a book they’ve been carting around for year after
year, it takes on meaning—why would anyone keep (treasure?) this book? And why is it being
given to me?
Of course we can still share important texts with each other when they’re in electronic form, and
indeed it’s usually easier to do so—that’s one of the virtues, after all, of having older content
forms now accessible via new media: easy to store, easy to share, easy to start a discourse about.
But in all that ease it’s also easy to lose sight of the critical and curatorial opportunities that we—
and those who are now growing up without the primacy of the book—may be losing out on. Why
should I hold on to this particular book instead of donating it or adding it to the yard sale pile?
Choices have to be made for the simple, even crude, reason of physical practicality. Only so
many bookcases, only so many shelves, only so much available space. Only so much armstrength.
And this is something librarians know a thing or two about: what’s worth acquiring, preserving,
telling people about, and re-purchasing if a better version comes out or the original one just goes
to seed.
Well, guess who else engages in much the same process?
Fans. They support noobs in identifying and understanding the key texts in a given fandom, help
their peers find the more obscure ones, and create and maintain Web sites in honor of bygone
media products—all without any compensation from the media producers and publishers. They
facilitate interaction between readers (broadly defined) and texts, as well as between like-minded
readers (aka their fellow fans).
Although countless librarians are clearly also fans (I probably wouldn’t have this gig if that
weren’t true), there are important—and instructive—differences between the two groups.
Librarians must curate, organize, and annotate texts that hold no personal interest for them. And
librarians must do this for the widest possible population of end-users, not just those who already
gravitate toward a specific author, genre, franchise, or storyworld.
Huntress fan, with comics scribe Gail Simone. (Photo credit: Luigi Novi.)
Yet fans and librarians are forced to undertake their parallel missions in the same market-driven
cultural environment that keeps product coming so fast that we barely have time to catch our
breath, let alone exercise our critical faculties to the degree of which we’re capable. Often we’re
reduced to simple binaries of like-it/don’t-like-it or buy-it/don’t-buy-it instead of explicitly
making the deeper connections that speak to why we’re fans in the first place. To be clear, my
intention here is to put down neither media publishers nor the commercial impulse itself—that
would be like condemning rainfall because it can lead to flooding—but rather make what may
seem like a counter-intuitive claim: being a fan can not only co-exist with being a thoughtful
reader, but in many ways is a prerequisite.
Still, all this talk of heavy books can obscure the idea that’s it’s not the preservationist impulse
itself that’s essential, at least not to most of the educators and fans whom I know. Rather,
ultimate value lies in the conversation about saving and transmitting. Because that dialogue, both
internal and external, is where it’s at. Determining what’s worth clinging fast to, what’s worth
being passionate about (and then sharing that passion), and what’s worth leaving as a legacy to
those who come after us—that’s the heart of the matter. So give me your thick-cut, backbreaking volumes, and I’ll give you mine, and together we’ll bestow them to those who may be
too young to know the rewards of heavy lifting—even if it means that these “books” sometimes
come in the form of Web comics, movies, and music videos. In the end, it’s their weight upon
our hearts and minds that really matters.
Oh, and by way of postscript, just the other day my eldest handed me (not just recommended)
reading material for the first time in his life: a Spider-Man and Wolverine team-up from last year
(actually, a reprint). In fact, it’s a comic that a buddy of his gave him a few weeks earlier, which
means that I’m now effectively part of the community of twelve-year-old readers, a fact that I’m
inordinately proud of. And because he shared this story with me that he really likes I’m tempted
to say of him, a bit proudly, a bit condescendingly, “Hey, he’s learning”—but of course, one
would hope, so are we all.
About Peter Gutierrez
A former middle school teacher, Peter Gutierrez (fiifgutierrez@gmail.com) has spent the past 20
years developing curriculum as well as working in, and writing about, various branches of pop
culture. You can sample way too many of his thoughts about media and media literacy via
Twitter: @Peter_Gutierrez