They will be nearly as ubiquitous as the mosquitoes this August long weekend. The trilogy of detective novels written by the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson are found wherever Canadians have a few moments to themselves. Why? Because they give pleasure, a pleasure that is different from any other.
Books are not dead or ailing. The world still craves a good yarn. Mr. Larsson's books have sold 27 million copies in 40 countries. The love of reading, of storytelling, is universal. The pleasure it gives needs no explanation. Everyone who has experienced it knows what it is.
In U.S. writer Gary Shteyngart's dystopian new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, young people can tweet but not read a book. They have grown stupid. "Our brains are being disassembled right now and being put back together in a whole different shape," Mr. Shteyngart told the Wall Street Journal, "and that is not going to be conducive to reading a 300-page thing that doesn't have any links."
Yet isn't it just as likely that the book (in various forms, including hand-held Kindles and iPads) will experience a renaissance? A world of 140-character messages grows oppressively - unnaturally - small. The book allows for a rebellion against the existing order. Why do police states ban books? Because they free the mind.
Observe a small child on the sidelines at her sister's soccer game. A book has fallen into her hands. She knows it contains treasures - perhaps she has seen her parents in thrall to a book, or they read aloud to her. She opens it, turns it this way and that. She can't wait to be big enough to gain entry to its secrets. That is her, all grown up and so deep in Stieg Larsson she misses her subway stop.
Far from turning away from reading, this generation of young people lined up at midnight to buy 800-page Harry Potter books, and devoured them in two days - passing them back and forth, chapter by chapter, among siblings. Thanks in part to those Potter books, boys have rediscovered reading, and are now staying up long past their bedtimes with the 12 books in the Cherub series, by the British author Robert Muchamore. Their appetite for well told stories is a revelation.
Like love or play, the joy of reading deeply is eternal. It will not be expunged by the television set or the Internet. The human capacity for concentration has not been so drastically altered. The book lives on.