Watched Any Good Books Lately?

A portmanteau word is formed by smushing two separate words together--the way clothes are crammed into a suitcase--to create a new word. Mix smoke and fog, you get smog; drive your motorcar to a hotel, you arrive at a motel; and now, splice video clips into your favorite book, you get our word of the day, Vook.

The newest new thing in publishing is the incorporation of video clips into digital (or e-) books. Now, when you download the latest Stephen King opus into your Kindle, you're likely to get not only juicy descriptions of flesh-eating caterpillars, but also perhaps a dramatization of said caterpillars' latest feast.

In some ways, this seems like a definite plus. For non-fiction and informational titles, this might be the greatest thing since movable type. Wouldn't it be neat to check out a recipe in a cookbook and then instantly be able to watch an experienced chef demonstrate how to prepare it? Or imagine a history of World War II: You could read a detailed description of, say, the Battle of the Bulge, complete with explanations of the strategies each army employed, and then click to a video reenactment that shows you how the strategies about which you've just read actually unfolded.

On the other hand, we're skeptical about the application of this technology to fiction. Fred L. Gronvall, an Amazon.com reviewer, writing about "Level 26," an e-novel, commented that "It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like." That statement depresses us. Because, Mr. Gronvall, a video clip doesn't show you "what the characters look like"--it shows you a casting director's idea of what the characters look like; or, perhaps, the closest approximation to a casting director's idea of what the characters should look like, given the performers who were available at that particular time. It's a safe bet they are not exactly what the author pictured when he wrote the novel.

What's fun about reading a novel--as opposed to watching a movie or TV show--is that you get to create the fictional world for yourself; you get to populate the novel with your own images, ably (we hope) assisted by the novelist. When we read Dickens, we want to imagine the characters in all their exaggerated, Dickensian unreality; we don't want someone else's too-realistic rendition of Mr. Pickwick forced upon us. Would our experience of reading Catch-22 be improved by seeing Snowden's "secret" spill out on the bomber floor? Or would that detract from the book's exquisite balancing of hilarity and horror, toppling it permanently in one direction over the other? We think the latter.

We'll give the last word to the novelist Walter Mosley: "Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow. And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we're watching television or doing stuff on computers."

(Well, except for reading "The Solipsist," that is.)

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New York Times Sentence of the Week:

"China's leaders marked their nation's 60th anniversary on Thursday with a precision display of military bravado that included, improbably, a female militia unit toting submachine guns and attired in red miniskirts an white jackboots, and a fleet of floats with representations of a giant fish and Mount Everest." ("China Celebrates 60 Years of Communist Rule")

"Improbably"? Well, sure, until you consider that the festivities were directed by Quentin Tarantino.

No?