Joy of Books

In The Joy of Books, Eric Burns, a passionate lifelong reader, offers us an engaging, informal history of books and reading, beginning with the first clay tablets and continuing on to the latest John Grisham legal thriller. This history, which is humorous in the most surprising places, reveals the power books have always had to delight and entertain, and, more seriously, to enlighten, educate, and "raise possibilities". But the story of reading contains many dark chapters on bookburning and censorship: from Plato's suspicion that books can "tell lies" to the concerted efforts by fundamentalists and others to ban or bowdlerize the classics of world literature. There are other enemies as well: the corrosive effects of "political correctness", the "dumbing down" of education, and the growing indifference to the printed page in a culture overrun by electronic media, in which too many young people proudly wear their aliteracy like a baseball cap turned backward. Are we in danger of becoming merely passive spectators in the marketplace of ideas? Is the special union between readers and authors doomed? Has indifference set in; do separation and divorce seem likely? The Joy of Books is for all who believe otherwise, who will delight in learning of the storms that readers and writers have weathered in the past, and who will take heart in the future from Burns's compelling vision.