Reviewed by:

• Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton
• Kathleen Lubey (bio)

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 [End Page 463] 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...

审核人：

• 克里斯蒂娜·拉普顿（Christina Lupton）的阅读与18世纪的时间创造
• 凯瑟琳·卢贝（生物）

令我感到放心的是，其他书籍使用者将不读书视为读书的一部分。作为一位花费大量时间研究鸟类在防火通道上点燃鸟儿并自发地洗净我的手工艺品的作家，我很高兴知道自己与书本的关系涉及距离和疏忽。在论文研究的某个时候，我在Roit Barthes的Post-it®上写了一段文章，并将其固定在我桌子旁边的墙上：“与我所爱的人在一起并想一些其他事情：这就是我的想法我最好的想法，我如何最好地发明我的工作所必需的。同样地，对于文本：如果能够间接地听到自己的声音，它会给我带来最大的愉悦。如果阅读它，我被引导经常抬头，听其他话”（《文本的乐趣》，反。理查德·米勒（Hill and Wang，1975），24）。由于不看书就能获得洞察力的想法而感到鼓舞，我可能直接去了体育馆或欢乐时光。

克里斯蒂娜·拉普顿（Christina Lupton）的《读书与18世纪的时间的形成》向像我这样不那么专心的读者保证，印刷品的工作长期以来一直在提醒我们不要读书。书籍向读者表示除了阅读以外他们所做的事情。正如Lupton所说，“只有阅读才能阅读”，而读者则必须工作，社交，倾向于亲人。他们部分阅读或阅读混乱，重读了一些书，但从未读过其他书（20）。我们很少读完现在的完美，而是读“在语法上不太可能的时态，不容易用时间的描述来体现”（12）。Lupton对读者和书籍不屑一顾，但关注个别读者对书籍时间的计算方式，因此邀请我们-回顾她先前对书籍“人工智能”的主张（知识书籍：18世纪英国的调解意识[宾夕法尼亚大学出版社，2012]，第14页）-思考装订的书籍[End Page 463]并不是塑造读者的内容，而是读者渴望和渴望的场合。巴特斯（Barthes）认为愉悦与我们暂时离开的一本书有主要关系，而卢普顿（Lupton）却改变了比例：我们的大部分时间都花在不读书上，与书籍的短暂接触会产生愉悦，想象和政治的特殊形式。

拉普顿（Lupton）的第一章生动地阐述了书籍在读者生活中的推拉作用。从基督教精神实践中继承了安息日所特有的暂时性，一些18世纪的读者将星期日奉献给其他工作日所禁止的精读模式。周日阅读不是由书中的内容来定义的-凯瑟琳·塔尔伯特（Catherine Talbot），塞缪尔·约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）和食品杂货商托马斯·特纳（Thomas Turner）都选择了不同的方式–而是由书中所指的“时间奉献”来定义（56）。这本书主要是分时的工具，其次是内容的工具。在后续章节中，我们以重读作为“选择性重用”书籍的方式引导我们，读者以此来构建秩序和幸福感（78）；非线性阅读，使读者可以想象选择的“未来期货和过去的情况”与看似确定的情况不同（95）；并阅读未读书籍以减慢阅读速度，

阅读和时间的创造不是一般意义上的阅读，而是关于在“广泛读书的第一个时代”（2）非精英人士所使用的特殊形式的书籍（2）。像我们一样，他们感到压力重重，因为他们无法经常使用书籍。Lupton消除了这样一种观念，即时间短缺是数字时代所独有的。书籍的重要性从历史上就表明了其阅读不完整的状态，呼吁读者为它们腾出时间。第一人称小插曲将我们带入了18世纪至21世纪，在这里，卢普顿（Lupton）沉思于自己的书中作为货运或家具的经历，因为在阅读电子邮件或用笔和纸书写时，文字形式被忽略了。积累...