1068
4/13/2021
Do Books Matter?
Was reading an article re: whether book reading matters. The author was an older person because he said that he had worked in the Clinton Administration.
We like to flaunt that we read lots of books and value book reading. But what matters to me is not reading books cover-to-cover. What matters is how you connect the information within them and how you use them in everyday life.
I think book reading is superior to reading on the web because it's more focused. What's interesting about using the internet compared to book reading is that you can keep notes, which is a way to connect them.
What I've realized over the years is that I can flip through a book just in a few minutes and know if it's something that I've seen before and don't need to revisit, or it might be information that I could access on the internet.
What happening now with book writing is that it's [suffused] in the internet and social media, creating a feedback loop between the two.
The point is not how many books you read; it's how you've connected them. The fact that authors now have to be on social media to market their books means that they're continuously posting. It used to be that you read the book and perhaps the author wrote an article about it. Now it's a continuous stream of posts, and I wonder how useful it is--perhaps for a revision or a second edition, for example. (It's particularly interesting in the respect that it extends a book beyond its edges--as "enhanced" CDs and DVDs did in the late 90s. "Edges" also means the edges of the content--meaning the text is always wet and dynamic). Physical books are also unique in that the spines make them more ubiquitous and available. They are a reminder of what's in them.
A long time ago I had this idea--long before a streaming video that you could buy film "singles". If you liked the film, you could buy single scenes of your choice, and like the spine of the book, it would remind you of the entire film. If you could just play the single then you'd be reminded of the whole album, as well as memories connected with listening to the music at a certain time in your life (the spines). This goes back to connections (singles) within books--phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, which can be used as memory encoders, and become human universals.
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"A photo of Clinton in his seat on the plane with a book by liberal economist Lester Thurow on his lap appeared in national newspapers. Did reading these books affect Clinton’s foreign or economic policies? I doubt it. Clinton was more influenced by talking with Wall Street investment banker Robert Rubin than he was from Thurow’s work, but these books reminded voters that the Governor of Arkansas was a Rhodes Scholar who valued reading."
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/04/09/do-books-matter/
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(Also: 0970, 0793, 0699) On the idea of the "Book-Man": "On some shelves in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book, this librarian is analogous to a God. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the fact that worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path, and every path in vain. How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered him? Someone propose searching by regression: to locate a book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity." Borges, Jorge Luis, Erik Desmazières, Andrew Hurley, and Angela Giral. The Library of Babel. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000. Print.
