book learning
Kevin Drum:
As longtime readers know, I’m generally a scourge of cranky elders who spend a lot of time kvetching about how ill educated kids are today compared to the golden age they used to live in. Spare me. But that doesn’t mean the opposite is true either. Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it’s reasonable to draw from it. That’s because they don’t know the context. They don’t know the rest of the story. And that’s because they don’t read enough books. I’d love to be wrong about this. But I’m not. If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you still need to read books. If you do, the internet makes you smarter. If you don’t, it makes you dumber.
Reading about Leonardo da Vinci lately has made me feel more and more the urgency of learning. I think the above is very true—the Internet is limited. I’m also interested in how we learn from others in person—how to get past the funny-story part of any given conversation into learning about the interesting things other people are learning/researching/thinking. This also has to do with the bit I quoted from Davenport’s “On Reading” the other day, about how the things we know interact in our brains, producing some lovely new combinations.
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As you read the novel your mind shifts from the level of solutions, exegesis. The activity is delightful, but also one of pain. Each shift is accompanied by a sharp sense that something is being lost, or has already been lost. Exegesis mars and disrupts pure absorption in the narrative. The narrative insists on distracting your attention from exegesis. Yet your mind is unwilling to let go of either level of activity, and remains arrested at a point of stereoscopy between the two. They compose one meaning. The novelist who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing.
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It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. […] Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese, or even French philosophy and much of German criticism? Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all […] Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does not better than if he took a nap. The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions,—such call I good books.
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DailyLit
PSA for a Monday: I thought I’d recommend DailyLit, the service where you can sign up to read books via email. This is one of the most perfect things ever invented for people (like me!) who have boring desk jobs. Because here’s the thing: if I could read a book at my desk, I totally would. But since I can’t, when I want to take a break from work, I end up looking at stupid crap on the internet. What a waste of time! I wish I could use this time to read things I actually want to read!
So I signed up for DailyLit, and have installments of books delivered to my work email each day. The text is in the body of the email, if someone looks over at my desk, it appears that I am reading through some work-related something.
Tips for office workers: When I first tried DailyLit, I did it wrong. I subscribed to semi-ambitious books. That just made me dread the daily emails, because I couldn’t switch my brain over to “serious reading” mode in the middle of work like that. But now I subscribe to fun, plotty 19th century stuff (most of which was written to be serialized, and lends itself well to email blurbs). The Scarlet Pimpernel was great this way, any Horatio Alger, most Arthur Conan Doyle, any 19th century children’s books you are curious about.
A late 1930s poster © Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
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You should never just read for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for God’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid.
Sweet.
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Reading positions by Kate Beaton (who’s on Tumblr!)
