Two books on my bookshelf: the first, a Penguin paperback of The Recognitions by William Gaddis, the spine reinforced with tape, almost every one of the 976 pages covered with annotations in several different colors of ink, some pages torn, many dogeared, some obvious coffee stains. It’s a survivor of a misbegotten thesis project. The second, an old copy of Grace Metalious’s soapy Peyton Place which I found on 6th Avenue two years ago & read cover to cover over the course of six delirious hours when I had taken more DayQuil than I should have. It’s a cheap paperback from the late 1950s, and its yellow pages have clearly passed through any number of hands, but they’re almost entirely unmarked. (God only knows why I decided that I needed to read Peyton Place. I can’t recommend it.)

One of the themes that arose in the first session of Transliteracies was that there are several different types of reading. When academics talk about reading, they tend to mean an intensive activity; there’s typically a lot of writing involved. A great deal of reading, however, isn’t anywhere near as intensive: like my copy of Peyton Place, the text escapes unmarked by the pen. When we talk about moving reading from the printed page to the screen, this is an important consideration: the screen needs to accommodate both of these. Why can’t we curl up with an electronic book? has been a persistent question since electronic reading became a possibility, but it misses the important point that we don’t want to curl up with every book we read. We can only curl up with something if we’re reading it – to some degree – passively.