The Biblioracle: There's no app for appreciating a book

 E-reader

E-reader (Christina Reichl Photography, Getty ImagesFlickr RF / August 30, 2013)

I recently misplaced my glasses. I say misplaced instead of lost because I know they're somewhere in the house, I just can't put my hands on them. When I told my wife about my misfortune she said, "you need an app for that."


This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.


 You hear a lot of "you need an app for that" these days. There's apps for just about everything. There's probably a "Glasses Finder 2.0" for all I know.

I was thinking about this when I picked up a copy of Marisha Pessl's recently released "Night Film" at the bookstore. Pessl's 2006 novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" was one of the most interesting books I read that year. I say interesting, rather than enjoyable or calling it a favorite, because I read a number of books that I thought were better, and during the actual reading, I wasn't always enjoying it. At the time, critic Janet Maslin said about reading the book, "A 500-page headache is as possible as a bracing joyride."

I experienced both sensations. Featuring a precocious, prep school student narrator, Blue van Meer, the novel is a kind of murder mystery with many, many digressions. The writing was baroque and larded with extra-textual literary references that I was catching maybe 30 percent of the time. I alternated between thinking it was one of the greatest novels ever written and wanting to hurl it into a raging fire. It is both maddening and energizing, one of those books I didn't necessarily enjoy at the time but couldn't stop thinking about afterward.

It was beautiful, but flawed. Overexuberant and overstuffed. It challenged me in interesting ways.

All of this is to say that I thought Marisha Pessl was an original talent, and I was looking forward to whatever she did next.

Slow forward seven years, and "Night Film" has arrived.

"Night Film" is the story of a fictional cult film director, Stanislas Cordova, and is told through straightforward narrative and apparent fragments of found documents, web pages and other Internet effluvia included as part of the text. In the bookstore I pawed through the pages, anticipating the experience I was about to have once I got the book home.

And then I put it back down.

What I'd seen was that "Night Film" was not only a book but an "app." (For both iPhone and Android, naturally.)

In that moment, I realized that I didn't want to read a book that was also an app. I feel too young to be a curmudgeon, but there it is. I thought about my experience with "Special Topics," about all the things that probably flew past me, and how the same kind of things in "Night Film" might be explained to me by the app.

Or not, because while I may still read the book, I will not under any circumstances download the app.

I don't want to experience books this way. I don't want books that need "enhancement." Maybe I'm an outlier, but the attempt to bring the physical book into the world of the Internet (or maybe it's the other way around) seemed wrongheaded to me. Rather than a bold swing at something fresh, it seems like a sop to the crowd that thinks newfangled technology must replace the old, as though a book with only words is no longer sufficiently alluring.

Being generous, I can assume that the app is a creative, rather than commercial choice on Pessl's part, but I can't imagine the added value.

Maybe that lack of imagination is a problem on my part.

Biblioracle John Warner is the author of "The Funny Man." Follow him on Twitter @Biblioracle.

The Biblioracle offers his reccomendations

1. "Tampa" by Alissa Nutting

2. "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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