Reading Henry James

This is, apparently, a valid question for some people. In a New York Times article about “hybrid books” – new forms of electronic books that include multimedia features – one Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, wondered,

“Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?”

Here at Reading Henry James, we certainly have the patience to read the Master. As I pointed out in How to Read Henry James, one may need to practice “slow reading” to get used to reading fiction like James’s, but also fiction by other authors from the 19th century (if one is not familiar with reading such authors).

In my short lifetime, I’ve seen radical changes in the way people experience media. About to turn 50, I’ve seen black-and-white television, then color; VCRs, then DVD players; the early computers and today’s handheld terminals, and now dedicated ebook readers. Yet, through all this time, the book has remained stable. What’s new is not the texts contained in books, but the way they are presented. It’s true that today’s young people are so used to things that move and go bang that they may find it more difficult to immerse themselves in books. I shudder to think that I may be part of the last generation to grow reading and to continue to do so throughout life, but we are facing new means of distributing written works that will change the way we read.

However, I am not against ebooks or ebook readers. I have Amazon’s Kindle app on my iPod touch, as well as another app called Stanza, which can download books from Gutenberg.org, and have read several books on that screen. While it’s not a “book-like” reading experience, I have no trouble reading that way. In fact, I plan to do some of my Henry James reading on that device. After all, with all those books in the public domain, the Henry James’s entire oeuvre is available for download for free!