How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen

end of elementary school, when poetry was something between a punishment and a spelling bee, “The Children’s Hour” committed to memory, and college, when I took a modern poetry course from the same professor who found Galsworthy beneath notice. He had a fine, sonorous voice that rang in the small stuffy classroom, vying successfully with the sound of traffic on Broadway, and those half glasses that I still associate with intelligence even though I now wear, and loathe, them. And when he read Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” aloud, dipping his out-sized shaggy head to the page—“For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry; to maintain ‘The Sublime’/In the old sense. Wrong from the start”—I knew that, whatever else I might be, I was no poet. My books from that course are full of painstaking marginalia, as though if I paid close enough attention the bird would fly in my breast. But I didn’t have poetry in me. I wrote fiction in college, and then for many years I wrote fact, as best I could gather, discern, and describe it, as a newspaper reporter. Then I wrote fiction again. Reading taught me how to do it all.
    “Books are over,” the editor of a journal to be found only on the Internet told me one day at a conference on the future of the newspaper business. Just my luck. After all these years of reading books I’d finallywritten one; when I took time to alphabetize my shelves, it came between Proust and Ayn Rand, which seemed representative of how I’d read all my life, between the great and the merely engagingly popular. I could still remember the time I had held my first hardcover book. The Federal Express truck raised a cloud of gravel and dust on a country road as I ripped into the envelope, removed the book, and lifted it up and down in my outstretched hands, just to feel the heft of it, as though it was to be valued by weight. I held it the way I’d seen babies held at religious ceremonies, a bris, perhaps, or a baptism. Hardcovers: every writer’s ultimate ambition, whether she admits it or not.
    It was a fearsome frisson that ripped through the business, the business of writing, the business of publishing, the business of newspapering, when I was well into all three. The computer had become like the most miraculous sort of technological Swiss Army knife: each time you thought you knew what it could do, it turned out that it could do more, faster, better, more accurately. I wrote my first novel on a big clunker of a machine that wheezed slightly when it stored information and had a mere 256 kilobits of memory. It just managed to hold the book, the word-processing program, and a few other odds and ends. My third novel was composed on a machine that fits into my handbag and weighs slightly more than a prematurebaby. The program corrects my punctuation and capitalization as I type; when I try to type a stand-alone lowercase
I
, it inflates it into a capital letter, correcting me peremptorily, certain I’ve made a mistake. I could keep a dozen copies of my book on its hard disk and it wouldn’t even breathe hard.
    And there was less than a decade between the publication of those two books.
    So it became easy, as the age of the computer washed in a wave of modems and cybersurfers over the United States at the end of the twentieth century, to believe those who said that books need never leave the soul of this new machine at all, that the wave of the future was this:
The Age of Innocence
on-line, to be called up and read with the push of a VIEW button;
The Fountainhead
via the Internet, perhaps with all the tiresome objectivist polemical speeches set in a different font for easy skipping-over (or even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand’s editor should have taken care of). No paper, no shelf space, and the ultimate democratization of reading: a library in a box much smaller than a single volume of the old leather-bound
Encyclopaedia