Read Online The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online

little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from roaming on it. If you want the pleasure art gives, sure, you can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer: but those artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, but most blogs are merely self-indulgent, and the best I’ve seen function only as good journalism. Maybe they’ll develop aesthetic form, but they haven’t yet. Nothing in the media provides pleasure as reliably as books do—if you like reading.
    And a good many people do. Not a majority, but a steady minority.
    And readers recognize their pleasure as different from that of simply being entertained. Viewing is often totally passive, reading is always an act. Once you’ve pressed the On button, TV goes on and on and on . . . you don’t have to do anything but sit and stare. But you have to give a book your attention. You bring it alive. Unlike the other media, a book is silent. It won’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laughtracks or fire gunshots in your livingroom. You can hear it only in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
    Because they’ve put something of themselves into books, many people who read for pleasure have a particular, often passionate sense of connection to them. A book is a thing, an artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, pleasant to look at and handle, which can last decades, even centuries. Unlike a video or CD it does not have to be activated or performed by a machine; all it needs to activate it is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is there. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though of course you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
    This is important, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely re-usable, an article of value.
    In the durability of the book lies a great deal of what we call civilization. History begins with literacy: before the written word there is only archeology. The great part of what we know about ourselves, our past, and our world has long been contained in books. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all center their faith in a book. The durability of books is a very great part of our continuity as an intelligent species. And so their willed destruction is seen as an ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been remembered for two thousand years, as people may well remember the desecration and destruction of the great Library in Baghdad.
    So to me one of the most despicable things about corporate publishing is their attitude that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets the covers torn off or is pulped—trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. It wants a blockbuster a week, and this week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there wasn’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of corporate publishers in handling backlists.
    Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now called “the midlist,” can keep publishers in