It occurred to me the other day that our vocabulary is all wrong in this debate over e-books – in the same way it’s misleading to talk as if America actually had “healthcare, when we really only have very expensive sickcare.

We don’t read e-books or hardcovers. We read what people write.

Books – whether print or digital, whether downloaded or mailed, whether new or old – are just one way that writing reaches the people who want to read it. Books are just one way that people get paid for their writing.

Books are not what I read; they are where I read things that interest me. I find writing in books interesting, because I like writing that reflect the author’s authentic research, originality, and talent. I like the sentences and paragraphs they choose to combine to make a book; I like the way their long story begins and ends.

I think if books are to survive we have to stop thinking about books as a “consumer product.” Format usually follow price, but the quality of what’s inside a book does not.

We need to start thinking about books as a place where writers write and readers find them. If printed books morph into e-books, that’s really not a lot of change.

If we don’t want to lose writing that’s long, and thoughtful, writing that requires time to create – if we want writing we such as we find in War and Peace, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dreams From My Father, or A Room of One’s Own -- we have to find a way to subsidize the places readers can read what such writers write.

I submit that we could learn how to live without books. It’s reading and writing we can’t live without.

And the possibility of that impending loss is what we should talk about.

For a very interesting essay about how a book differs from a Web search, see this article in Foreign Policy:


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Why We Don't Need To Reinvent The Book For The Web Age
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The book format may have already evolved (along with the web) far beyond what we would have ever expected
http://www.booktrade.info/i.php/21076

If you like historical fiction, I think you'll enjoy Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia, which gives voice to the silent Italian wife of Aeneas in Vergil's poem. For any reader who wants to go beyond the faux mythology of Twilight, this novel captures a young woman's emotional daring beautifully. The story has gore, sex and life after death, but also love, honor, and real poetry.

(One of my favorite pieces of literary trivia is that LeGuin is the daughter of the anthropolgist who wrote Ishi the Last Yahi, and all her fantasy and science ficiton novels are grounded in an exquisite and authentic detailed speculation about how other cultures might live and worship.)

I've loved Biblical archeology stories ever since I first read about the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is strange (as Susan Gubar points out in her new literary biography of Judas), that so few of us raised within Christian churches were ever taught to see Jesus as a Jew before the Scrolls raised those issue.

Whether you think the historical Jesus was a Rabbi who disliked the Temple hierarchy, a secret Essene, a Jewish Zealot, or the divine founder of Christianity, the debates over the scanty historical evidence are fascinating.

An entertaining, non-academic contribution is Nina Burleigh's new book, UNHOLY BUSINESS, which explores the Israeli legal case for forgery against the antiquities dealer behind two of the most important finds of 21st century: a unique engraved stone which purported to be contractor's list for the First Temple (Solomon's); and a stone ossuary dated to 60 CE and inscribed in Aramaic as belonging to "James, son of Joseph and brother of Jesus."

Long before the trial, both the finds were political footballs, the one validating the Western Wall as part of the Temple Mount beneath the Muslim Dome of the Rock; and the other proving Jesus lived and (equally divisively) that he had a "brother" -- the Protestant view -- not a "cousin" -- the Catholic view. Burleigh gives a clear idea of both the theological and criminological issues, with very likable Israeli detectives as central figures.

If you’ve been to Israel, Burleigh will help you relive some of the archeological highlights; if you haven’t, you’ll want to go.

(There's a lovely quote in the book from a minister who, although he volunteers on archeological digs every summer, says, in the end, faith is faith precisely because there is no proof; he doesn't worry that his faith can be disproved by science, and therefore, I gather, science can't be his enemy.)