How many books have you been “meaning to read”? Personally I’ve avoided contact with the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels since Christmas (I know it’ll be all-consuming) and am ashamed to admit I don’t even own a copy of War and Peace for similar reasons. But if you were to tell me that all issues of either of these books would soon dematerialize, you’d find me planted on a couch for the next several days, fully engrossed in reading.
Which is why James Patterson’s self-destructing book Private Vegas is a thought-provoking — if problematic — experiment. Releasing this week, it follows recurring protagonist Jack Morgan from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where a chain of seedy happenings is set off after his car is firebombed. The story’s par for the Patterson course, but includes an inventive interactive element — only 1,000 readers will be able to download the book, and 24 hours after beginning, it will disappear in a cloud of smoke.
Like Eterna Cadencia’s novel printed in disappearing ink, it allows us to consider whether a little instilled FOMO is all the book world needs to compete commercially with more event-centric media, like TV.
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The concept of a collaborative reading experience may be grumbled about by some — after all, is the private act of exploring another’s thoughts not special? — but decriers should be reminded that “The Bachelor” isn’t the only form of entertainment religiously logged on Twitter. Even art exhibitions conductive to interaction, such as Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” have their own hashtags.
In many ways the book world, with our trending literary puns and obsessive Goodreads starring, is hungry for a way to make reading more social. Perhaps giving stories expiration dates is one way of achieving that.
