Price is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia ... Price’s book about books reads like an anthology of ironies, including several that pertain directly to it. This book is self-consciously shaped by, and susceptible to, its own account of how we read now. Price takes divided attention for a virtue, and practically invites a reader to keep a device nearby to flesh out her examples. Almost every piece of data has its own story to tell ... Her radiant descriptions of the physical properties of books, the forensic traces—from smudges to candle wax—of earlier bodies holding them, immediately sent me to the Internet.
What We Talk About is a trade book—an academic’s gamble to curtail the jargon, abridge the methods, and efficiently translate the discoveries for a broad readership. In those respects, Price’s work is a stunning success. Its line of argument is so clean and its prose so seamlessly driven by its embodied 'I' that we forget the ghost of the archives hiding in the footnotes ... What We Talk About may open with a scene on Amtrak, but it’s replete with sourced data and illustrative passages on railroad reading. It may gently state the difference between a 'book' and a 'text,' but it still includes the moment I like to call the 'scholarly drop'— when a writer maps the academic terrain, summarizing the half-dozen books that promote the myths to be challenged. In doing so, What We Talk About makes an implicit, and important, bid for one value an English academic brings to the public sphere: to tell the history of literature ... It reminds us that when a sterling English professor talks about books, she may offer something different from judgment: truth.
Price is passionate about expanding how we view the book, expressing a love that ripples throughout What We Talk About When We Talk About Books ... The academic tone of Price’s writing can sometimes weigh down a chapter , but her forays into such topics as reading groups enliven the pages with color and energy. Anyone curious about how books communicate to us may be enthralled by Price’s intelligent look at what print has meant to the world. If you’re as fond of books as I am, you’ll be additionally comforted to learn that despite the many times pundits have proclaimed the book’s death, its heart has continued to beat strongly, transcendent as always.
Bibliophiles will be left spent and breathless, well-sated by a rich diet of delights ... In her charming, conversational style, Price takes a balanced approach to issues ranging from assertions the sky is falling in the world of reading— dooming modern culture—to an ongoing, well-researched and reasoned study asserting there’s nothing occurring now that hasn’t happened throughout history, to one extent or another ... Each chapter presenting a different book-centric topic, she branches out into compelling, related issues best read slowly, to savor. Every page boasting highlighter worthy quotes, Price repeatedly courts controversial opinion, carefully outlining reasons both sides have valid points ... a sparkling gem well worth reading and re-reading ... deserves a permanent spot on the shelf of every book lover.
... a witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature ... it’s hard to disagree with Ms. Price’s tacit argument that the book community would be a healthier place if its gatekeepers were a little less precious about what happens there.
...Price counters the biblio-doomsayers with an incisive look at what the archives reveal about books and reading—then, now and moving forward ... Price takes this affectionate study of the history and future of reading in many disparate directions ... She contemplates the reality that the challenge of reading today is not the availability of books, as it once was, but finding the time to read ... Eye-opening and filled with delightful nuggets of truth, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books offers no nostalgia for a more tranquil reading past but rather a hopeful glimpse into an essential reading future.
Price is an avid scholar of books as objects (not just of their texts) and her wit extends to the very format of the book, which carries surprises beyond her observations and research. For fans of Susan Orlean’s The Library Book (2018) and other books about books ... Price gets to her point in under 200 pages.
The essays suggest more than form a single coherent argument about the book today, but Price’s ideas that books are a communal thing and that reading them, in at least one sense, is a profoundly social act are pleasing even if libraries are now different from our childhood memories and if those books come in many forms besides between covers ... Readers who enjoy books about books will find much to like here.
[Price] combines a lighthearted romp through literary history with a serious intent: to argue that the rise of e-texts is not the radical change often claimed ... Price’s factual tidbits are entertaining ... Price provides welcome comfort that the beloved book is in good shape, regardless of the form it ultimately takes.
