摘要：This is the Age of the Reader. With this no doubt overly portentous (not to say pretentious)beginning, I wish to point out the massive proliferation of hefty tomes of collected, previouslypublished essays that have come to be called 'readers': the kinds of books that are under reviewhere. Publishers' lists are increasingly filled with such recycled, reassembled material, whileauthors complain of the difficulties of finding publishing outlets for scholarly monographs. Thereis an economic impetus for this ¨C such readers are good business ¨C but this itself may besymptomatic of a different kind of 'rise of the reader', a rise which we might even venture to linkwith the alleged 'death of the author'.It might initially seem perverse that such books are called 'readers'. They are so largethat it is unlikely that they will be read in toto (except by a particularly diligent reviewer). Eventhe shortest of the volumes reviewed here has more than 400 pages. Neither are such booksvery 'reader-friendly' in physical terms. (It took me longer to review them than I had hoped partlybecause they were so inconvenient for lugging on train and plane journeys.) Even the lightestof them weighs almost a kilo; and the heaviest ¨C Grasping the World ¨C is nearly 1.5 (inpaperback). If readers (in the book of essays sense of the term ¨C what I will henceforth call'readers-as-books) advocate a particular kind of reading, it is of a 'dip into', 'pick-and-mix' ¨Crather than linear 'beginning to end' ¨C kind. This is, perhaps, a style of reading especially attunedto our more distracted age of lower concentration spans and time-poverty; and it recognizes thatreaders (in the person sense ¨C henceforth 'readers-as-persons') may be accustomed to theshorter chunks of text and hyperactivity of the web. Moreover, not only does the format ofreaders-as-books not assume that readers-as-persons will start at the beginning and read onuntil the end, it invites readers to select for their own particular interests. People are thus, incontemporary cultural studies parlance, prompted to be active in relation to the text ¨C a movethat has been celebrated in other cultural circles, not least the museum (an analogy to whichI return below). All of the books reviewed here recognize that they will be engaged with in partialand perhaps eclectic manner by their readers
