We are what we read

They're our "first steps," as it were, in the journey of language, and their impact is hard to overstate. Yes, of course, today a wide variety of other media, from television to movies to social media, compete with them for our attention -- but few other forms of human storytelling have the ability to get quite so far "under our skin." As the Irish novelist Flann O'Brien once quipped, a book is "like a drug, administered in private." It's we ourselves, with our own imaginations, who must give life to the stories within their pages. And, in so doing, we become a part of them, and they of us.

The earliest books we encounter are probably those especially intended for children, books that were read to us, perhaps, before we could read for ourselves. Others soon follow, but the imprint of our childhood reading can be a lifelong one. In my own case, I can vividly remember the first time I read The Lord of the Rings -- I was fourteen years old -- and immediately, decided that I must become a professor and give lectures about Middle Earth and its denizens (I recorded a few of these on an audio cassette, perhaps fortunately long-lost). It only took me another seventeen years, but I knew for certain from that point on that I'd found my calling in life. Other formative books, of course, can have less pleasant consequences, as when, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, both Victor Frankenstein and Arctic sea-captain who encounters him turn out to have had their lives shaped by books -- narratives of exploration for the captain, and the occult tomes of Cornelius Agrippa for Victor. Even the "monster" is shaped by books, in his case Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Milton's Paradise Lost!

The power and danger of books has sometime led to them being chained to their shelves, as many volumes were in the Middle Ages; it's also led to them being banned and burned. And today, the familiar "book" has taken on other forms: the e-book (which, though I'm not sure is really a "book" in the full sense, is far more portable) and the audiobook, which -- particularly since it mutated from large and expensive boxes of tapes or CD's to streaming formats -- has steadily risen in popularity; according to the PEW Trust's surveys, 1 in 5 Americans listens to them. Most of us now have at least one portable device -- a phone, pad, or laptop -- that enables all the books we have in these formats to accompany us wherever we go.

So watch this space -- tomorrow I'll be posting the results of our survey, with an emphasis on reading, and some of the individual books and characters we came to love the most.