Smith’s love of reading comes across throughout Portable Magic, but this is not an idealized account, nor does she seek to romanticize the role of the book in history. “Books are wonderful, challenging, transporting,” Smith writes, “but sometimes also sickening, disturbing, enraging.” As in “The Master and the Pupil,” books are objects that carry tremendous power, power that can be used “to misinform and manipulate as well as to comfort and educate.” They are also objects characterized by remarkable endurance in the face of attempts to censor them, destroy them, or render their technology outdated (even e-readers, Smith notes, have “closely […] shadowed the codex form” and mimicked “the familiar forms of the Western book”).
