Reading is suddenly popular again.

Books – good old fashioned sheaves of paper bound with glue – are not about to disappear into the e-wasteland of e-commerce after all. No matter how successful “Riding the Bullet” was. (And if you know that one, can you name another “e-book”?)

Mostly, it’s thanks to some really cool vampires. And a teenaged wizard with John Lennon glasses. And perhaps some dragons, assorted TV shows and movies, and the hidden message that may lurk in Leonardo Da Vinci’s artwork.
Apart from that Da Vinci book that everyone on Earth has read, much of this new reading wave is being sustained by young people. And it’s not because their parents are forcing them to read – it’s the kids pestering adults to buy them books. And not just comics or skinny little 60-page things, but massive doorstops of books whose page count would daunt many literate adults.

It’s great because if today’s teenagers get interested in reading real books, maybe in 20 years when their friends try to replace books with interactive online e-stories, the former readers of Twilight and Harry Potter will fight back.
Don’t laugh. Back in the mid-1990s when the internet was just starting to take off, in its bland, text-only way, high-tech prophets were predicting the end of all printed matter within as little as 10 years. Books would become wholly electronic, downloaded onto your hand-held “reader” as needed.

Newspapers and magazines would turn into something like Wikipedia, where a reader could click on various links within the main “story” to get background, history, definitions, even video of what they read. If you were really lazy you could have the mellow computer-generated voice read the book or story or play to you.

It hasn’t happened – yet.

There’s just something about that (sometimes) weighty collection of paper, cardboard and glue that makes reading far more enjoyable that simply scanning words on a screen. I’ve heard many people say they can’t read things onscreen – not long things. Curling up with a good laptop scrolling the latest bestseller just doesn’t generate the same feelings as the idea of curling up with a good book in an easy chair.

Author Lynne Truss (see below) says it’s because books have a history – they’re manufactured things that have existed in time – and they’re actively involving: you have to hold it, turn pages, move your eyes. Computer reading has no history, words merely flow across a page, there’s little activity involved (other than pressing PgDn) – plus, you can’t scribble notes in the margins.

In honour of Library Month, and our newfound love of reading, here are a few fun books about language and reading.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss, tagged as “the zero-tolerance approach to punctuation.” Combining history of grammar and printing with the basic rules of punctuation, it explains why it’s OK to write “Henry James’s novels,” but it’s always “Jesus’ words.” Although supposedly geared to grammar “sticklers” – people who would cringe at seeing “Tim Hortons cup’s” on a sign, for example – it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the U.K. before coming across the sea.

Death Sentences, by Don Watson. A funny and scathing essay in book form that explains (among other things) why politicians say things like, “In terms of the future, we’re committed to an agenda that represents a definitive paradigm shift, in respect of voter response going forward.” And why letting them get away with it is ultimately damaging to democracy and society in general. A hit in Australia (Watson was an Australian government speechwriter), before coming to North America.

Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, by Barbara Wallraff. Not quite a laugh-a-page, but a quirky attempt to create words for all those people, situations and especially feelings that modern English can’t cleanly express. Like the restless feeling that leads someone to keep looking in the refrigerator when they're bored, even when they’re not hungry: “fridgety,” perhaps. They used to do this sort of thing on Saturday Night Live back in the 1980s, but terms like “lapflaps” and “igni-sec” haven’t stuck.

Rotten Rejections, edited by Andre Bernard. Not exactly about language, but definitely inspiring for anyone who’s sent the Greatest Short Story Ever Written!!! to a magazine only to discover the fiction editor doesn’t share the writer’s notions of what makes a great story. It simply quotes from early rejections of now mostly famous, critically acclaimed, or well-known books and stories (“unsaleable and unpublishable” – Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), sprinkled with stories about books rejected over and over only to sell millions in the end.

If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. Again, not exactly about language, but a fictional exploration of the relationship between writers, words, and readers. An unnamed “reader” goes on a search to find the book started in the beginning, only to discover 10 different books, a computerized book-creation system, an odd author, and romance in a bookstore. Calvino is an Italian writer known here mainly for a massive compilation of Italian folk tales – his novels are rich in language, full of patterns within patterns, and thick with imagery.