books

His Desire to Participate in the Ongoing Conversation

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 1 May 2004

Gabriel Zaid: “A person comes late to a conversation and believes that he can't follow it, that he needs to be better informed: as if knowledge were something other than conversation itself, as if it were something to be acquired elsewhere first. Friends recommend that he take certain classes, which bore him; that he read the classics, wchich also bore him. The truly enlightened thing would be to recommend that he have more confidence in his appetite for conversation; to tell im that if he is interested in something he doesn't understand, he should pay more attention, ask questions, reflect, consult dictionaries, manuals, classics, but all in the service of his desire to participate in the ongoing conversation. [...] The desire to follow a conversation that you don't understand is a healthy sign, not an indication of lack of preparation. Discipline is good in the service of desire, not in place of desire. Without desire, there is no living culture.”

For avid readers of books, I strongly recommend So Many Books, Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, a short book which is really a love-letter to other books and the book-publishing industry. Zaid says that the book has many advantages over TV, music and even the Internet and "e-books": books can be skimmed, read at one's own pace, are cheap, permit greater variety, require no reading device other than the person holding the book, and are portable. Zaid also writes about the economics of book publishing, and, probably my favourite section of the book, describes unread books in one's personal library as "unfinished projects".

Reading books is the only thing I thoroughly enjoy doing, and Zaid's defense of not merely reading but reading books has only fed the obsession I have with them.

So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Posted by Richard on Friday, 30 April 2004

Finished reading So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

I put the book on reserve at the library, but forgot about it. Actually, I don't remember reserving it, but I read it anyway, and enjoyed it very much. It is a love letter to books, publishing and reading. Jay McCarthy has notes and a review of the book, which I sent him as a gift. I subsequently wrote a review of the book.

It Doesn't Control Us

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 3 January 2004

Ken: “Some of us read to read. We savor the words and linger over their texture. We aren't looking for immediate gratification and a quick fix. We aren't checking our list to make sure we read every blog on it today or this week. We're looking for gems of wit and wisdom. We're truffle pigs in search of a morsel worth savoring, and willing to take the time to enjoy it. We control the information glut, it doesn't control us. We choose the blogs we read with the same kind of care we select our favorite books.”

Books Vs. Conversations

Posted by Richard on Friday, 19 December 2003

Barnaby on why reading a book is easier than having a conversation:

The holes in writing provided by punctuation put themselves in conversations in the form of invitations to join, these are pauses and gestures and direct questions like, 'What do you think?' It looks to me like it's easier to pick up a book than it is to join a conversation and it's easier to leave a conversation than put down a book because though a conversation is only ever there at a certain time, a book is available for starting any time (though no less can you start a book with no holes than you can finish it) and that a conversation is in this way a book turned inside-out. A conversation with only two people is easy enough because holes are necessary for both of you, else the conversation dies without ever having been anything. But a conversation with two people with those holes intended at those two people can easily enough keep anyone else out through providing no more holes and presenting the third party with this impossibility.

Blogging Books

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 29 November 2003

Joi Ito: “reading a book while thinking about what to blog is a slow, but interesting way to read a book.” I've done that before (see here, here, and here), and blogging stuff in print is a little odd, because bloggers and weblog readers are used to being able to click to the source of the quotes, but having to actually hunt a book or article down is a little, which usually involves physically going to the library and waiting if the item isn't available, well, it's not very "Internet". Some things are best read in print form, however—I regularly photocopy long articles in print editions of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, usually because that's where the articles appear, and it makes reading them on the bus a lot easier—and books are no exception.

Jay at makeoutcity.com has a category dedicated to book reviews and summaries, as well as lengthy quotes, and even talks a little about how he feels about each quote. Blogging quotes, be it from online or print sources, and then either putting it into one's own words gets people at least engaged in the ideas presented. I would say this is especially true for print quotes, where one has to type out the quote by hand, rather than cut & paste. By copying out the quote, it (to an extent) helps internalize the idea being presented and may even help to, y'know, read what's actually being said rather than read what one wants to read. (A few times I've read a passage in an article, copied and pasted it, and then thought, 'waitaminute, I disagree with that'.) Jay blogs non-fiction books because, well, I imagine non-fiction books are easier to blog, being filled with ideas rather than plot or character development.

Cost is Zero

Posted by Richard on Monday, 25 November 2002

Michael Kinsley: “Many years ago, I conducted an experiment of placing a note in copies of several briskly selling books in a local Washington bookstore. The notes had my phone number and offered $5 to anyone who saw them and called me up. No one called. Though hardly scientific, this tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them.”

I can see what Tina (whose site is where I first saw the link, but didn't click on because I didn't realize Kinsley wrote it) is saying: having worked in a library for a couple years now, it occurs to me that people like taking out books more than they like reading them. Although, with books, there's marginal cost to factor in (i.e. if I want to have this book, I have to spend x amount of dollars), whereas for libraries, the bargain is reversed (i.e. the cost of taking out another book is zero, since I've already paid my property taxes). But I can see where Kinsley is coming from: I've taken out at least double the amount of library books that I've read (i.e. most get returned unread), but that's only because I can afford to.

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