I like books and love shopping for them. In the past few years I’ve tried to commit more to reading physical books and it has been a process, but overall not terribly unsuccessful. I went through a Kindle phase a few years back but really prefer the tactile feel of paper, and part of the reason I want to read more is to get away from digital devices, so I quit the e-reader and have been collecting a few books here and there ever since. I’ve taken bits of Farnam Street’s advice and recognized that book reading doesn’t have to be a strictly cover-to-cover endeavor, and that it will take time to find what I want to read.
It helps to have someone outright say it: quitting a book is OK. Reading books doesn’t have to be a rigid process, and thinking it has to be that way may have stalled my interest in even starting books in the first place.
Going to bookstores is not just an activity that I partake in to purchase books - it’s a whole sort of therapy in and of itself; the bookshop offers a medium for the brain to wander into different topics, to take a sentence or two or a slice of a chapter here and there and form a new thought process, a new path down a road that the neurons haven’t fired about for in a while. It is an escape from my little world of life in my head and an entrance into a myriad of subjects and snippets that will change my brain’s thinking in real-time.
Engaging in a bookstore trip - going through the bazaar of books shelved in aisles, picking out specimens casually, flipping through them and feeling their weight and power in the world, maybe reading a thing or two, and then making a decision if I want to pick that as a journey sometime in the future - directly makes me feel like a more well-rounded individual with an expanded worldview before I even read a full page. Bookstores in and of themselves, if properly situated in coziness and aura, provide a calming environment for a wholesome journey amongst different topics and potential interests. It helps me find my interests and provides me something new to look forward to exploring - in text form.
I am an explorer, after all.
I purposefully look for obscure material. I mean, I have read plenty of Moby Dick and a little bit of the classics, but what I really enjoy doing is looking through used bookstores for material that speaks to my adventurous side and gives me the sort of enigmatic engagement in. I mean, how many people argue against the global economy? Or have read some of Virginia Woolf’s short stories? Or stories about Cold War disinformation tactics? All of this curious material makes my gears spin. I want to feel like I’m off the beaten path and explore lowkey arcane categories for the thrill of it. I still make time for the big titles, though, or at least understand their significance.
I’ve become fond of nonfiction material simply because it offers me direct insight into the world, but I also enjoy the flip side - some fiction is exceptionally good (and can be easier to read). Fiction is much more of an artistic and directly subjective endeavor - for example, I thought Hills Like White Elephants (Hemingway) was breathtakingly well written, but I have to be in a different state of mind to appreciate that in comparison to some of the historical stuff I read which is a different level of analysis. I find I am generally halfway in between the artistic and logical states of mind, but I lean artistic when I engage in reading, so I find art in, for example, the details of globalization to some extent, and will find clarity of time periods and history in fiction to some extent. Literature, as a whole, is incredible to me.
Without further ado… here are some of my favorite books!
- Flush (Virginia Woolf) – a beautiful novel and fantastic metaphor for life itself.
- The Case Against the Global Economy (Mander, Goldsmith) – an argument against the multinational corporation tyranny!
- Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky) – very telling about the world of manly men and their casual insanity.
- The Ages of Globalization (Sachs) – an excellent tour of human history and how our changing ways have weaved unique problems.
- How to See Yourself as You Really Are (Dalai Lama) – explains the Buddhist view of self succinctly; quite mind-blowing.
- Set Phasers on Stun (Casey) – (from my human factors course in college) – a psychological tale about engineering design failures.
I may write individual pieces, or a longer piece, on these books, to explain my thoughts on them.
Happy page flipping,
Daniel