As extravagâncias de Julio e Emilia não era apenas sexuais (que existiam), nem emocionais (que eram muitas), mas também, digamos, literárias. Numa noite especialmente feliz, Julio leu, meio de brincadeira, um poema de Rubén Darío que Emilia dramatizou e banalizou até tranformá-lo num verdadeiro poema sexual, um poema de sexo explícito, com gritos, com orgamos. Então virou um hábito o lance de ler em voz alta - em voz baixa - toda noite, antes de trepar. Leram ‘O livro de Monelle’, de Marcel Schwob, e ‘O Pavilhão Dourado’ de Yukio Mishima, que foram razoáveis fontes de inspiração erótica para eles. Mas logo as leituras se diversificaram a olhos vistos: leram ‘Um homem que dorme’ e ‘As coisas’, de Perec, vários contos de Onetti e de Raymond Carver, poemas de Ted Hughes, de Tomas Tranströmer, de Armando Uribe e de Kurt Folch. Até fragmentos de Nietzsche e de Émile Cioran eles leram.

Probably the biggest change is going to come from the changed definition of what we’re reading. More and more, texts will evolve the way Wikipedia entries evolve; the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox—something you’d expect from a novel, but not from a magazine article, say. And that open-endedness will likely mean that the reader is capable of participating, adding links, commenting, suggesting new avenues for exploration, fact-checking. So we’ll have to read in an even more focused way, I suspect, knowing that we can have a say in where the text eventually goes. So there you go: ebooks and digital text are keeping us from skimming and forcing us to engage with the text more directly. Who would have thought it?