Sweatin' to the classics

I'm writing this article with a Ducati pen. Made of the same aluminum used in race cars, fastened with a clip that emulates an engine bracket, this ''high-performance writing machine" models its cap after motorcycle headlights. None of these facts are visible to the naked eye: I know them only because the pen comes from Levenger's, the purveyor of verbosely described desk accessories - or, in their preferred phrase, ''tools for serious readers." Ballpoints made from weapons-grade alloys, inks engineered to flow in outer space, acid-free bookmarks for your Tom Clancy: It's hard not to feel sorry for high-end reading and writing gadgets, overqualified for the life they're destined to lead.

I used to wonder whether people who browsed Levenger's encyclopedia-sized catalog had time to read anything else, any more than homeowners who could afford incinerator-grade stoves ever have time to cook. Now Levenger's chief executive, Steve Leveen, is wondering that, too. His new book, ''The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life" (Levenger Press), says nothing about bookmarks, booklights, bookstands, Book Bungees, or even Booksuits (''the limber bookcover that stretches like a Speedo swimsuit"). Instead, it tells buyers how books themselves can change their life. Leveen writes with the fervor of a self-described ''born-again reader," an average Joe whose midlife crisis caused him to discover that reading makes life more ''electrified and zestful - like living in color rather than black and white."

Normally, a life-changing experience would require you to change your ways. Leveen dispels that fear: Far from being an eccentricity that will cut into your partying, your exercising, or your income, reading becomes the logical extension of the activities that you enjoy already. A library is a ''fueling station for your mind"; book groups are health clubs for, you guessed it, the mind; a good library works like a wine cellar; and like nobodies at a cocktail party, boring books should be quickly abandoned.

You test-drive a car before you buy it, so why not preview a book before you read it? In fact, if you replaced ''books" with ''men," Leveen's advice to ''take charge of your reading life and radically increase the quality of the books in the pool that you select from" could be lifted straight from Rachel Greenwald's bestseller ''Find a Husband After 35: Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School." Living down the road from South Beach, Leveen substitutes pages for calories: my mental spam filter flagged ''just three hours," ''no guilt," and ''transforming results."

So what's the secret? The answer is simple: audiobooks. ''Your Well-Read Life" encourages you to ''risten" while mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, or washing the car. There's an irony here. The chief executive who got rich by selling Italian leather bookcovers that turn the latest Dan Brown into ''a convincing replica of cherished volumes," the man whose catalog copy suckers us into ditching PDAs for fountain pens, wants you to replace sight by sound. When he promises to electrify your life, he means it.

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Audiobooks aren't as radically new as Leveen makes them sound: the quest for hands-free reading, whether by buying bookstands or by paying someone to read aloud to you, is as old as the book itself. If anything, the opposite is true: What's new is our expectation that reading is normally silent. For most of antiquity, reading meant reading aloud. In the fourth century St. Augustine was shocked to see his teacher, Ambrose, staring at a page but making no sound. Even once the new convention of inserting spaces between words (ratherthanrunningthemtogetherlikethis) allowed readers to parse text without having to sound it out syllable by syllable, medieval readers continued to move their mouths, as children do today. Workers in Cuban cigar factories routinely paid a lector to read aloud to them: Montecristo cigars honored the Dumas novel that they heard over the course of weeks and months.

At a season when every hard-to-buy-for graduate receives gift books like Tom Raabe's ''Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction" or Anna Quindlen's ''How Reading Changed My Life," you might ask why Leveen's pieties count as a ''valuable secret." The answer, judging from ''The Well-Read Life," is that reading doesn't actually resemble driving, exercising, boozing, or schmoozing: It's more like getting your nails done.

Just as elaborate marketing is needed to distinguish aftershave from perfume, so it takes blurbs from both a professor and a corporate vice president to reassure men that curling up with a book won't make them ''tweed-jacketed" sissies. General Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, and George Plimpton are Leveen's reading role models - along with Nelson Mandela, who earns a place on the list on the grounds that his prison stay left plenty of time for books.

In the years when ''cockpit desk," ''weekend warrior," and ''Palm Pilot" entered our language, Leveen's target customer could store his Paperweight Raviolis (suede pillows filled with buckshot) in a ''large and muscular duffel," or unstuff his business card ''holster" while lounging in a chair that's ''strong as a saddle" and modeled after a tractor seat. (If Levenger's were a restaurant, it would have to be a steakhouse: the mousepad with built-in notepaper is dubbed Surf & Turf.) This fall, Harvard exhibited the safari library that Teddy Roosevelt had bound to order in pigskin; for a lower price, you can buy a Levenger briefcase in your choice of pigskin or baseball-glove-style leather. You can also find a fountain pen whose ink reservoir mimics a gas tank and a mechanical pencil whose retracting mechanism is explained by analogy with a gearshift. In this ''deskscape," every pen is a joystick, the mirror-image of those pastel-handled screwdrivers sold for twice the price in the women's section of the department store.

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''Be an athlete, not a spectator," Leveen tells would-be readers. But for most of Western history the whole point of reading has been to lie around. Not everyone saw this as a good thing: In 1874, one British critic charged that ''reading has become a downright vice - a vulgar, detrimental habit, like dram-drinking...a softening, demoralising, relaxing practice, which, if persisted in, will end by enfeebling the minds of men and women, making flabby the fibre of their bodies, and undermining the vigour of nations."

For its defenders no less than its attackers, the important thing about reading was always that it stood apart from the rest of life, not that it resembled revving a Harley-Davidson or flying a fighter jet or scoring a touchdown. For the turn-of-the-century American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, higher education was a prime example of ''conspicuous leisure," a sign that you were rich enough to waste your time on an activity that earned no wages.

In the hundred years since Veblen, conspicuous leisure has given way to ostentatious overscheduling. An elite that bomber-jackets its Franklin Planners is hard to sell on reading. Or maybe reading is unmarketable for an even more basic reason: Unlike walking the dog and organizing the closet, you can't pay someone else to do it for you. ''You have a personal trainer; why not a personal reader?" asks one series of business audiobooks; but while Renaissance grandees paid young men to read aloud to them, these days a tape deck isn't much of a status symbol. What Leveen seems to have realized, after years of selling paperweights, is that the scarce commodity is experiences, not things.

''It would be a good thing to buy books," Schopenhauer once said, ''if one could also buy the time in which to read them." Once you can ''risten" to the three-CD edition of ''Your Well-Read Life," the only place for books is on the coffee table.

Leah Price is professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book is ''The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel."