‘Tis the season for culinary feasts and time to break out our favorite carving boards and pie plates. When it comes to literary feasts, what is your favorite serving platter?
I’m still partial to printed books, but I suspect that is due to their aesthetic appeal. There’s something comforting about the sight of book jackets neatly lined onto shelves or stacked in a “TBR” pile. 
There are those who challenge if all formats are “real” books. To me, it’s akin to arguing about whether stuffing served outside the bird is truly stuffing or if wine bottled with a screw cap is legitimately wine (answer: yes to both).
Thanks to e-readers, bibliophiles no longer need choose between packing enough books to take along on vacation or packing clothes. But since I admit to being a book voyeur, digital collections make quite the challenge for me to ogle other people’s book stockpiles.
Does the medium influence how we process our information intake? In “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” author Nicholas Carr writes, “…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
I can relate to developing the attention span of a squirrel and too often skimming the surface, so disabling or reducing embedded digital distractions where possible seems a good practice. But if the choices are between e-reading and not reading, I’ll still vote for the former.
There’s also another worthy way to serve words.
In an earlier post, I wrote about cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s lyrical words + music audiobook, “Beginner’s Mind.” More recently famed non-fiction author Erik Larsen released his first novel – a ghost story, “No One Goes Alone,” available only as an audiobook because as he explained, “ghost stories are best told aloud.”
A good audio story can ease the tedium of long car journey or keep you company on a walk (please, heads-up about the cars though.) One caveat about narrators: some authors aren’t the best choice to read works aloud, even their own, so I suggest you listen to a sample to decide if you enjoy the speaker’s style. I often listen to non-fiction that I might not otherwise read, but I have friends who swear by the opposite practice.
On occasion, I hear an audiobook so compelling that I then buy the print version to reread it, as I did with Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” and Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone,” – high praise for both.
However you serve your books, may you enjoy the feast!
“The act of reading…begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.” Adam Gopnik