So Many Books - Tapa dura

This small book is a gem: an absorbing conversation
about the whole point of reading, the surplus of titles,
and our own lack of time.

(Alasdair Palmer Sunday Telegraph)

Gabriel Zaid is a marvelously elegant and playful writer -- a cosmopolitan critic with sound judgment and a light touch. He is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him-- you'll see. (Paul Berman, Author of Terror and Liberalism)

Gabriel Zaid's defense of books is genuinely exhilarating. It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many hands. (Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of the New Republic)

With cascades of books pouring down on him from every direction, how can the twenty-first-century reader keep his head above water? Gabriel Zaid answers that question in a variety of surprising ways, many of them witty, all of them provocative. (Anne Fadiman, Editor of the American Scholar, Author of Ex Libris)

Zaid traces the preoccupation with reading back through Dr. Johnson, Seneca, and even the Bible ("Of making many books there is no end"). He emerges as a playful celebrant of literary proliferation, noting that there is a new book published every thirty seconds, and optimistically points out that publishers who moan about low sales "see as a failure what is actually a blessing: The book business, unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small scale. (The New Yorker)

So Many Books is not so much a book as a conversation: about books, about reading, about the mad business of how a book is born every 30 seconds. It is a book of proposals and arguments and debate about books, from the age of Socrates to our own. Join the conversation.