Reading “War and Peace” On My Iphone
Can you truly absorb yourself in literature on a tiny, squinty screen?
Back in 2014, I wrote this essay about reading massive novels on a teensy screen.
It originally ran on BookRiot, but vanished in linkrot a few years ago. So now I’m resuscitating here on Medium: When I reread it, everything I discussed still seems pretty relevant!
This is the story about how I read War and Peace on my iPhone.
According to some scholars and pundits, I probably shouldn’t have done this. These days, critics of digital reading worry that serious literature sort of can’t be adequately read on high-tech devices. Screens, they fear, are inherently inferior to print. Phones are twitchy hives of activity, speeding us up and yanking us in all directions. Paper books, in contrast, calm us and slow us down. In her new book Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, the linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the research and concluded that digital screens are pretty lousy environments for deep, immersive reading. There are plenty of studies backing her up. When scientists test these things, they find that people who read a text onscreen remember less of it than people who read it on paper. The books don’t seem to lodge in our souls as well.
