Post #2 (What is a book?)

A book is an escape route from reality into the deepest parts of your mind. Opening a physical book and flipping through the pages, releases an entire world into your thoughts. When you begin reading, there's a battle in your head. The world from the story is attempting to remove and reject reality and take it's place (momentarily). When you take that and shove it behind a screen, that world becomes trapped. It can't escape. It immediately loses the battle with reality because of the fact that technology is a constant reminder of the world we live in. If you're reading a book about the colonial times, how does that piece of technology bring the story to life? They don't fit. You don't experience the true era. And that's why i agree completely with Tom Piazza's argument. He states that when caging a book behind a screen, "you get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist's ambition...". He aslo goes on to say that "the information has no smell, no weight, no texture. Nothing that seriously impinges on your reality". The Kindle and iPad just don't do it for me. They don't draw me into the book as much as turning pages do. It's my own little world that isn't a part of the reality I'm currently in right now. I can completely disconnect from technology, struggles, anything. That's what I'm not willing to give up for the sake of using technology. I strongly disagree with Victor LaValle when he said that books are treated like a pair of stone tablets. It's not like we worship books. It's simply that once you pick up a book, you crave it. You love the feeling of escaping into it. Is that so wrong to find that insanely special? So saying that a book is "no more divine than a toaster" is completely ignorant. A toaster is the same every time. But a book is definitely not.