I don’t usually yearn for Books As Physical Objects. I don’t have great detail vision, so I usually like the large-print, high-contrast of an ebook for comfortable reading. I can read a typical paperback, but it’s enough effort that it sometimes keeps me from drifting off into the bookworld.
For instance, I remember standing in Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore—“long gone now,” to lift DeLillo’s line. It was around 1996, and I was considering a paperback copy of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The cover, you see, had cried out to my teenage self. A ninja type, sword raised, stands before an arch of ancient brickwork, bulging with duelling bulls in relief. But beyond the arch, across a plain of circuitry, a futuristic skyline awaits. Above the title, a header declares the book to be “THE #1 SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLER,” the definite article doing some work. Below the title, a blurb from something called Los Angeles Reader (also “long gone now”) is blunt: “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”
On the back cover, there’s a vote of confidence from William Gibson no less, maybe my favourite writer, plus other appealing endorsements. “A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” says one blurb. A “gigathriller” sporting a “cool, hip cybersensibility,” says the publisher’s copy. Hey, it was the 1990s.
Source: I Remember the Bookstore – Longreads
When I opened The Full Moon Coffee Shop, I was expecting a dreamy magical-realism story…
In Tyler & Tess in the Magic Maze, by Samuel Warren Joseph and Phil Proctor,…
Thirst: A Novel of Lost Innocence and Redemption, by H.W. Terrance, is a heartfelt addiction…
Re-reading and reposting: I first got caught up in the lifestyle p0rn aspect of We…
The story of Shanghailanders, by Juli Min, starts in 2040, and goes backwards in time,…
View Comments