“It doesn’t bother me [that my students do most of their reading on screens] all that much, actually. Harold Bloom very sensibly talks about saving those students who are saveable, teaching to that minority who have the potential to be transformed by Whitman and Blake, who already suspect that betterment is to be found in books, not in electronic illumination. We writers and teachers don’t change lives, and we certainly don’t make lives. We nudge them. We nudge the nudgeable. Let’s not let anyone tell us that the Internet is going to murder the book, because the automobile has yet to murder the bicycle. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect invention, and perfection dies hard. What object is more beautiful than a book?”
—Except from an Interview with William Giraldi, writer of the novel, Busy Monsters, by Steve Almond in “Poets and Writers,” July, 2011.