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READING. Read the following article and answer the questions below:






Read the following article and answer the questions below:

1. What are the threats to the book that could have finished it off in the 20th century?

2. Why has the book survived? Is it a puzzle?

3. How do you understand the headline of the article?

BURN THEM OR BURY THEM, YOU CAN’T BEAT BOOKS

How often have books, especially poetry and novels, been declared dead? And, looking back down the long avenue of this century, you count the graves of the doomsayers but the book drives on into the third millennium.

It is a triumph of fact over theory, of the empirical over the abstract, because in theory, the book has not stood a chance, not a hope, not a prayer. And yet it thrives.

One quick way to defend the health of books today is to point out that a great number of very bright people are still choosing to write them. But indeed, the book ought to be dead, cremated and buried.

Films ought to have cut the book off at the knees. By “book” here I’m talking about fiction and biography in particular, and of the act of reading. For the act of communal seeing, which until very recently films always demanded, would surely take away the time necessary for private reading. While, it was also argued, the films themselves told stories, adventure stories, detective stories, war stories, romances, comedies, histories, tragedies, musicals – a bigger range than ever dreamt of. And these projected magically across a darkened theatre brought us all our dreams 40 feet high in a way surely books could not match.

And if films did not deliver the death blow, then there was radio, which swept into the mid-century and on certain channels provided alternative books – drama, documentaries, discussions. Happily moored to the wireless, the mid-century generations could be given direct access to words and speech as direct and dramatic in the public sense as at any time since Periclean Athens, and as compelling as any tale told by an Indian storyteller.

Then came television: surely that would finish off the book. Television, the great collective hearth of the second half of our century where millions warmed their imaginations and pleasure buds, and it too soaked up time. It too delivered stories – into your lap.

Finally comes the Internet, with John Updike, no less, starting a chain novel on this new threat; and there’s the talking-book with another taste-setter, Tom Wolfe, using it for first publication; and there will be more invaders: meteors of potential destruction hurtling in from outer darkness attempting to destroy Planet Book.

Yet the book goes on. If we add the other enticement of this century, the CD, video games, the video itself to its direct threats, then the persistence of the book’s demand on the time and energy and intelligence of so many people becomes rather a puzzle. Because the theories are clearly right. The book ought to be dead, or at least withering on the vine. Why does not literature show proper respect for the reportedly less literate 20th century and its imperatives and hang up its books?

There is more than one answer. Starting at the outside – as leisure time has increased, and in many countries seems to increase further – and as health improves and age lengthens, there is more time to do more, including reading books. There is also tradition. In Christian, Judaic and Islamic cultures we are children of the Book. The Book – the Sacred Book – though an empty volume to many is still considered a source of authority.

In print is truth. By words we live and books bind the words together forever. We are dismissive of many traditions now but they have a deep pull and the book will not be given up lightly, if for no other reason than it has served so well for so long.

There is also the portability of the book, its unequalled mobility, its capacity to be revisited, to be utterly personally scheduled to be the easiest of references. Were it to be described in the late 20th-century jargon, it could be made to seem a brilliant late 20th-century invention.

Crucially, though, it is unparalleled as a work that brings the distillation of one single imagination to the attention of another single imagination – in order to set off that most astonishing chemistry called reading, which is a small word for an awesome enterprise. Reading in which, through these books in this world of words, one human being can trigger off, precisely, ideas, emotions, laughter and tragedy in the heart and mind of another human being, many miles, many centuries, many cultures away.

It has been and it is now and will continue to be a unique vehicle for art, thought, human contact, and the most profound sense of connection between two individuals, the one reading in solitude what the other in solitude has created, while between them worlds are reborn.

by Ben Okri






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