Though I was unaware of the term to categorize my thoughts at the time, it was during my undergraduate years when I first began to recognize the phenomenon of bookishness when living with non-humanities students. As my roommate and I sat on the couch and finished the show, Daisy Jones & The Six, we went back and forth on how good the show was and wishing we could experience it for the first time again. Having read the book before it became a TV series adaptation, I offered her my copy to have the reading experience, to which she told me that she wasn’t “into books.” As she headed to her room, I took note of the decorative coffee table books stacked on her nightstand and the movie poster for Call Me By Your Name, another book to screen adaptation.

In a contemporary world sped up by the digital and self-proclaimed “nonreaders,” the book as an object may not carry the same prestige of its early days, but bookishness is alive and well. In reading the beginning of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age by our own Dr. Pressman, I took particular interest in the book as an active agent as it was described, “In this case, “bookishness” suggests an identity derived from a physical nearness to books, not just from the “reading” of them in the conventional sense. The ‘-ishness’ also indicates that objects rub off on us” (Pressman 10). As a culture, we are so deeply engrossed in storytelling and the book whether it be recreating it into visual formats, creating aesthetic objects inspired by it, or replicating it into digital formats. Though someone may not perform the action of reading, it is impossible to understand the full extent of how books have “rubbed off on us.” Whether it is of conscious choice, the book remains near to us whether through material object of the performance of cultural identity and aesthetic. I use my roommate as an example not to judge her personal commitments to literature, but to illuminate ways we experience bookishness in daily practice even if it’s on a subconscious level.

When we began this course, I had great anxiety that books were becoming obsolete. In the ways through which media has progressed in society, book usage dwindles in comparison to technology which most of us can not work, communicate, or leave our homes without. How greatly we rely on technology was just illuminated by the Amazon web browsers outage that prevented countless from work and school. Bookishness, however, gives me hope for the future of books as it has made me realize how deeply books are engrained in our culture that they will not die.