She begins with a panoply of distressing statistics, including the decline in literary reading over the past two decades and the precipitous drop in rates of pleasure reading with the advent of television. These numbers are real, Price says, but our anxieties about the future of reading extend beyond what we can pinpoint on a graph. Our lamentations have become diffuse and metaphysical. We mourn “the habits of mind or even soul” that we associate with reading books: “the capacity to follow a demanding idea from start to finish, to look beyond the day’s news.”

Image Leah Price, author of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.” Credit... Jon Chase

Do you get fidgety when you read a book, as if your attention keeps getting tugged elsewhere? Price would say that you’re not alone — though she also suggests that this collective plight may be much older than the digital technologies we like to blame. The golden age we long for was never entirely real. Nostalgia venerates the past by shrouding it in forgetfulness.

“The history of reading is also a history of worrying,” Price writes in one of her characteristically elegant formulations, presenting a charming and discursive stroll through various iterations of moral panic. Books were long perceived as a source of anxiety rather than its solution. Reading was faulted for a range of physical ailments that included vertigo, gout and indigestion — what the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton called “all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting.” Eyestrain was a perpetual danger, of course, but so was “cerebral disorder,” brought on, in the words of one American psychiatrist, by an inordinate “fondness for light reading.”

Even our tendency to imagine reading as a form of impulse control gets a rebuke from the past. Fiction was especially suspect. Children of earlier generations showed their resolve not when they forced themselves to sit through a book but when they resisted the urge to race through it. One of the earliest entries in the self-help genre warned of the disasters wrought by too much reading, drawing a distinction between “life” and “action” on the one hand and “literature” and “study” on the other. There was the sad case of a young woman who, in the words of a Victorian-era expert, “gratified a vitiated taste for novel-reading till her reason was overthrown” and she became “an inmate of an insane asylum.” Imaginary worlds were too rousing — or else they were too soothing. Price unearths a 19th-century journalist complaining of fiction’s sedative properties.

Contrast those dire admonitions against reading back then with dire exhortations for reading right now, and you’ll begin to see why Price’s book — unlike other examples of what she calls “autobibliography” — is funny and hopeful, rather than dour and pious. She finds a particular irony in a contemporary program called Mood-Boosting Books, sponsored by the National Health Service in Britain. “Where once governments focused on censoring books whose topics included sex or violence,” she writes, “now they’re just as eager to promote the experience of long-form literary reading, regardless of subject matter.” She visits a storefront in London where “bibliotherapists” scrawl fake prescriptions for what to read next. “You get toothaches,” they tell Price. “So does Count Vronsky.”