Reviewing the Top 10 Nonfiction books of 2009 for Time.com, Lev Grossman writes–in reference to Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder:
There was a time when anybody with sufficient brains and willpower could go down into his or her basement and come up with a major contribution to what we know about the world.
Such thought-experiments take time — to conceive in the first place, to develop and take shape, to reflect upon, and finally to birth into the world. Good books–brilliant books–are, I believe thought-experiments in written form. They need to be borne of deep reflection (which is why I have an automatic negative reaction to those tomes that purport to help you write a book in a weekend–NOooooooooooooooo!!); reflections coming not just from the author but their agent, commissioning editor, and the other editorial and publishing staff involved in its birth.
Books can change lives in this way. Blogs — nah! Many are streams of consciousness, some (the better ones) are distillations of the blogger’s subject-matter expertise, distilled into manageable chunks. A blog, while a wonderful outlet for the habit of writing regularly, of testing reactions to small chunks of useful information, and developing the confidence to write a book, is hardly the place where you find deep, considered thoughts. After all, aren’t you supposed to be blogging, like, four or five a week if you’re going to achieve any following?
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the book publishing industry will continue to be greatly exaggerated as long as intelligent people maintain a desire to hold something solid and thoughtful in their hands as they ponder a book’s ideas and arguments.
When I think of a book I think of a well-structured, touching, life-changing movie that–once out of the theatre–causes you to think deeply about life. A blog, on the other hand, reminds me of a 30-minute episode from a TV series. Entertaining, certainly, but likely to be forgotten very quickly.
Perish the thought that, as Daniel McCarthy predicts, “book publishing will become more blog like.” If we have a hope in hell of wresting the direction of human advancement out of the hands of highly specialized corporations with their own agendas, and back into the hands of ordinary people, we need more of us “with sufficient brains and willpower” to both read and write books.