Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton (review)

I am relieved that fellow book users count not-reading as part of reading. As a writer who spends much research time watching birds alight on the fire escape and spontaneously hand-washing my delicates, I take comfort in knowing that one’s relationship to books involves distance and neglect. At some point during dissertation research, I wrote a passage from Roland Barthes on a Post-it® and pinned it to the wall beside my desk: “To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else” (The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller [Hill and Wang, 1975], 24). Emboldened by the idea that insight would arrive while not looking at books, I probably went straight to the gym or to happy hour.

Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century assures somewhat inattentive readers like me that part of print’s job has long been to remind us that we are not reading. Books signify to readers the things they do other than read. As Lupton puts it, “only reading reads,” while readers have to work, socialize, tend to loved ones; they read partially or out of order, reread some books but never read others (20). We rarely read in the present perfect, but in “grammatically improbable tenses not easily accommodated by descriptions of time” (12). Unsentimental about readers and books, but attentive to the ways individual readers account for their book time, Lupton invites us— recalling her earlier claims about books’ “artificial intelligence” (Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012], 14)—to think of bound books not as content that shapes readers, but as occasions for readers’ desires and aspirations. While Barthes imagines pleasure residing in a primary relationship to a book from which we momentarily depart, Lupton inverts the proportions: most of our lives are spent not reading, and relatively brief periods of contact with books produce particular forms of pleasure, imagination, and politics.

Lupton’s first chapter vividly lays out this push and pull of books in readers’ lives. Inheriting from Christian spiritual practice a temporality unique to the Sabbath, some eighteenth-century readers devoted Sunday to a mode of intensive reading disallowed by other weekdays. Sunday reading was not defined by what was in a book—Catherine Talbot, Samuel Johnson, and grocer Thomas Turner all chose differently—but by the “dedication of time” that books signify (56). The book was primarily a tool for dividing time, secondarily a vehicle for content. Succeeding chapters lead us through rereading as “selective reuse” of books by which readers construct order and happiness (78); nonlinear reading that allows readers to imagine choosing “different futures and pasts” than those that seem determined (95); and unread books as invitations to slow, collective reading that promises revolutionary change.

Reading and the Making of Time is not about reading in general, but about books as particular forms used by non-elite people in the “first era of widespread book reading” (2). They, like us, felt the stresses of not being able to use books as often as they would like. Lupton dispels the notion that such a shortage of time is unique to the digital age. The materiality of books has historically signified their state of being incompletely read, calling for readers to make time for them. First-person vignettes take us from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, where Lupton meditates on her experience of books as freight or furniture, as textual forms overlooked as she reads email or writes with pen and paper. Accumulated...