Chalk up another reason why the screen will never replace books: your nose.

It didn’t really hit me until today when I picked up one of those new Penguin Popular Classics, rejacketed in a lovely green skin. It was made mostly out of recycled paper, and it smelled sweet. As in honey sweet. I stopped every few pages to hold the book up and breathe in its heady scent.

Well, acting against this experience is Bill Gates - who once made a prediction that reading is going to become completely online.

“We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads … are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

For some reason I imagine a little iPod-like device with holes … from which we get little chemical particles that smell just like a new book. And as the file fades away (or gets corrupted) we smell mildew and dust and (gah!) rot. And soon we’d be all saying to each other: “Gosh! It’s got that new eReader smell!”

I understand that the way things are going books may very well be phased out, a direct result of commercial interests. And I don’t want to speculate. But I dearly, dearly don’t want books to go - if not for the feel of the page, the smell.

Like my copy of Silence Of The Lambs: smokey, old socks.

Want to take a sniff?

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The small bookstores in my town are conspiring against me.

A week ago I saw the usual selection of Stephen Kings and Jeffrey Archers, and lusted over We Need To Talk About Kevin (which I had never thought of buying before). I returned two days ago, determined to purchase just that. Headed straight down the aisle, reached for an unblemished copy, stood up. And found myself face to face with this:

It was one of the nominated books for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. And it was a debut novel, to boot.

I was petrified. Caught up between buying something I had wanted for a month and something … current.

And then, there! Another nominee for the Orange Prize! At the corner of a bookshelf, at that!

Oh no oh no oh no! I was trapped - only had enough money to buy one book. And all these books are so expensive!

What’s one litblogger to do when faced with such consummate strategy?

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Well now. Talk about wasting time. I spent the last 3 days browsing through the writing project lists for good litblogs to link to. Here are most of them (if I missed anyone out just leave a comment and I’ll append):

1. Benjamin Solah’s blog. He calls himself a ‘Marxist Horror Writer’. Apart from the fact that the word ‘Marxist’ conjures up images of Joseph Stalin in my mind’s eye (you don’t say?) I love the things he puts up. Take, for instance, this post, where he talks about writing backstories for characters. Or this one, which expounds on television’s influence on writing.

2. Textual Tangent. I’ll leave you ogling these lovely ladies, who are all completely engrossed in reading.

3. Confident Writing. Joanna Young submitted a piece called Beating Blogger’s Block. And then a quick spin through her posts made me subscribe to her feed - I can’t resist blogs on writing.

4. Reading Is My Superpower. Oh gosh. A green header, lots of book reviews, oodles of reading passion! And a How To Figure Out What To Read Next submission to boot!

5 . Reader Meet Author. Now I know this isn’t strictly a litblog, but Derick’s post on Identifying Bad Listeners was undeniably true. And a little uncomfortable - I could think of several instances where I’ve been more interested in talking rather than listening. Oh, and while you’re at it check out this narration on a stalker dove that’s been harassing him … hilarious, really it is.

6. Trevor’s Writing. Trevor left a comment over at Novelr the other day and I just had to agree with him: writer’s block is a joke when it’s not happening to you. When it does, however …

There. Six litblogs aren’t too bad, considering. I’ve got more content to slurp, and my Netvibes ‘Writing’ tab looks healthier. Long live the love of reading!

Psst: if you’ll excuse me now, ladies and gents, I’ve got Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin to finish. Which I’ve been intending to get for ages. Ohh - ecstasy!

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Sharon Bakar has posted up a fascinating piece she wrote for Chrome magazine in January 2006, which struck me not because of its truth (the publishing industry is well aware of the stigma surrounding female authors) but the quotes from some of her readers.

For the uninitiated, her article is about how men prefer to read male authors, opting out of reading prose written by the fairer sex. Listen to this:

… (a) blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

“I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with p*nis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”.

If that was the case I would’ve never read The Age Of Innocence - one of my absolute favourites. Nothing like heart rending, heart stopping dialogue as a warmup.

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Just to let you know, i’m starting to seriously crack my head over my sidebar. This is one of those rare times i curse the day PHP was written … Or that the fact Wordpress is written in PHP.But i guess it’s marginally better than dealing with Movable Type’s Perl Modules…

Nevermind. You’ll probably find this unbecoming of me to talk about my code woes on a blog about books - but bear with me for awhile. My War and Peace is stuck with Prince Andrew Bolkonski on the way to death, and my writing project is suffering a lapse as i dissect Edith Wharton’s ability to craft conversations that make your pulse speed up. Good stuff, just that it takes so much time.

PS: And, anyway, aren’t blooks literature on code? Think about that - ‘ol Dickens didn’t have to deal with programming languages to get published. He just needed a contract with a newspaper and a pen.

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