E-books. Let’s skip the “Is Print Dead?” and “Are Publishers Evil to Libraries?” debate and just talk about reading for a minute.
Do you think you read differently on your electronic reader of choice than you do a print book? I’ve found my eBooks pile up, unread, faster than my print books do (which is saying something, let me tell you…), maybe because eBooks don’t make an actual pile per se. They stay tucked away in their little digital home, minding their own business.
Unless, I’ve recently learned, they are un-put-downable.
Jenny Hubbard’s Paper Covers Rock was one such book. Alex is a sixteen-year-old student at an all-male boarding school. One of Alex’s best friends – Thomas – has just drowned after the boys jumped from a rock into the river, and in order to process, to distract, and to confess his own implication, Alex begins this, his “novel.” Short chapters jump quickly back and forth in time as Alex remembers good and bad times with Thomas and their friend Glenn and recalls the moments leading up to the accident, but like all teenagers (all people?), Alex gets distracted from literary re-tellings by moments in his present-day life. An intense and possibly reciprocated crush on his young English teacher – who may know more than she’s letting on about the accident – pervades Alex’s life, and the novels and poems of the classical canon she loves pervades Alex’s writing – the book is full of quotations, allusions, and general old-book-talk. As their relationship grows and Alex begins to reveal details from Thomas’s death and Glenn starts to act completely crazy, the tension lured me back to that silver eReader and away from my other reading.
I will say that when I’m reading an un-put-downable eBook, I start to click that little forward arrow faster than my eyes can probably be necessary. And reading this book so quickly and on an electronic device felt extra strange because A) this is a significantly literary-type book, one that could afford a little slow-reading, B) it is chock-FULL of bits of even MORE literary-type works (Moby Dick, Thoreau, lots of poetry) and C) it is set in the 80’s, when books were still made of paper.
The premise might seem to you more seasoned YA fans to be a direct rip-off of A Separate Peace, but it’s more like a variation on a theme, an deeper exploration of character, a satisfying companion. Whatever your choice of mediums, I would recommend Paper Covers Rock wholeheartedly.