So what are books good for？ My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it.
Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C. P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures" , the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isnt infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories. Storytelling is central to the work of the narrative-driven disciplines—the humanities and the nonquantitative social sciences—and it is central to the communicative pleasures of reading. Even argument is a form. of narrative. Different kinds of books are, of course, good for different things. Some should be created only for download and occasional access, as in the case of most reference projects, which these days are born digital or at least given dual passports. But scholarly writing requires narrative fortitude, on the part of writer and reader. There is nothing wiki about the last set of Cambridge University Press monographs(专著)I purchased, and in each I encounter an individual speaking subject. Each single-author book is immensely particular, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it. Scholarship is a collagist(拼贴画家), building the next road map of what we know book by book. Stories end, and that, I think, is a very good thing. A single authorial voice is a kind of performance, with an audience of one at a time, and no performance should outstay its welcome. Because a book must end, it must have a shape, the arc of thought that demonstrates not only the writers command of her or his subject but also that writers respect for the reader. A book is its own set of bookends. Even if a book is published in digital form, freed from its materiality, that shaping case of the codex(古书的抄本)is the ghost in the ghost in the knowledge-machine. We are the case for books. Our bodies hold the capacity to generate thousands of ideas, perhaps even a couple of full-length monographs, and maybe a trade book or two. If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated and subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.
According to the author, the narrative culture is______.
A．connectable
B．infinitely expandable
C．collective
D．nonquantitative
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