Gutenberg Elegies

Blog Response: Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies Chapter 2 In the Gutenberg Elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age, Birkerts describes his childhood and his love for reading that led to a desire to write later on in his adulthood. In the books second chapter; the paper chase, He offers an autobiographical experience as both a reader and a writer. He tells of how he loved to read very early in his life, taking after his mother who was an advent reader. He would get gripped by the book to extents of not leaving the house an attribute that his father resented in his son as he found it to be rather too feminine for a man his age. He would get engrossed in his novel simply for the love of being absorbed into another dimension with different characters as though he had travelled to that new land for the few hours he was reading. His connection to the content of the book first came from feeling the book. Even at this age he still had not developed a desire to become a writer and this would develop much later. He argues that solitude and serenity of being isolated as you read enhances the understanding of the content (Birkets 82).

He insists that books should be read, printed and experienced. The electronic media he claims is too impersonal and it leans mostly towards the thoughts of others. He reasons that the printed book reading is being pushed out to extinction by electronic books and the digitalization of the reading culture. He however accepts that the antisocial behavior brought on by reading a book in solitude has led to his struggle as a writer. This could be because by reading alone one only gets one point of view about the book and scenarios but by experiencing the book with another person creates a new experience for the reader and this new experience is what helps the writer in broadening ideas for a