Tuesday, March 4, 2014

The virtues of the book are independent of any bells, whistles or animation it might be made to contain... [and] in trying to make the case for books to our kids, exactly the case we want to make is not that they can compete with the virtues of computers or screens, but that they do something else: that they allow for a soulfulness the screens, with their jumpy impersonality, cannot duplicate - any more than the movies can duplicate the intimate intensity of theater, or than the computer can reproduce the shared-hearth-in-living-room experience of television that we now, ironically, recall nostalgically. ...What books do depends on the totality of what they are - their turning pages, their sturdy self-sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still.

~Adam Gopnik

3 comments:

Harvee said...

I do agree about paper books meaning so much more than ebooks.
Harvee
Book Dilettante

Connie said...

I really like this. I especially like that last line--"an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still."

Trish said...

Harvee - I love paper books. They're much warmer and somehow more real than ebooks.

Daisy - I know, right? I loved that line too.