The Double Life of Books - by Peter D McDonald

About the Book

Reflects on reading as a lived experience and a scholarly field by bringing together two modes of writing, the academic and the autobiographical, for the first time

Book Synopsis

The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls 'inner appropriation.' It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called 'ordinary reader' who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and reading. Ranging across world literatures in English since the 1890s and drawing on the latest research into the neuroscience of the reading brain, The Double Life of Books is at once an exercise in materialist autobibliobiography, asking what it means to be a living reader in our multimedia age, and a sustained reflection on academic professionalization, raising new questions about the limits of disciplinarity and critique.

Review Quotes

A wonderfully creative book. The most engagingly written, extensively researched, and illuminating account that I have seen of what it means to read in an informed way.--David Attwell, University of York

McDonald takes us on one engrossing and eye-opening trip after another into the multi-layered domain of the written word - writing as profession, as practice, as industry, as trade.--J. M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate 2003