Category: Books

For those of you that use my favorite online book trading website, Paperbackswap, I discovered two things today:

• You can only have 200 items in your wishlist.  (Don’t worry about me though.  Although I have over 200 books that I still want, I have two whole shelves of books at home that I haven’t read yet.)
• You can tell where you are in the queue to get a book.  Go to your wishlist, find the book you are interested in and mouse over the little exclamation point in a circle: .   I’m number 60 in the list of 337 people wishing to get the latest Harry Potter book.

That same New Yorker article, Twlight of the Books, says that it’s harder to watch a program you disagree with than it is to read an article you disagree with.  I couldn’t agree more.

The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel.
The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can
be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is
almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture
of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we
disagree with.

So as I’ve written earlier, we are spending less time with people who aren’t like us and now we are spending less time with opinions we don’t agree with.  What does that mean for us as a society?  Will we become more isolated and more diversified?  Or more similar and less tolerant?  For sure, if we no longer mix diverse opinions, we’ll have fewer new and creative ideas.

Literate people actually think differently (not necessarily better or worse) than illiterate people.  All examples from the New Yorker.

They use different words:

In naming colors,
for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but
illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed
teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”

They see different types of association:

Experimenters showed peasants drawings of
a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the
three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all
the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the
hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than
any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped
the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told
you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s
got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of
three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t
belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:
Oh,
but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working,
you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll
never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them. 

The illiterates (peasants in this example) didn’t like defining or describing things, even themselves.

Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What
the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing
beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in
terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own
heart?” one asked.

Quite interesting.  The whole article has a lot of interesting points about reading and society.

John Scalzi, the author of Old Man’s War, pointed me at Nick Mamata‘s story of talking about his book Under My Roof to a bunch of freshman.  It’s quite funny.  The listeners seemed to think that his book would corrupt people:

Explicitly, I was asked several times if I didn’t think that a kid
might read the book and build a bomb or become a racist or
anti-American.

By people that seemed to be having some politically correct issues of their own:

Indeed, one woman went off on a long tangent about making English the
official language of the United States — this was of course prefaced
with "I’m totally not racist, but" (you know, racist throat-clearing)
and then her friend said that yeah, she’d read a study that predicted
that in a few years New York would be 75% Spanish and that "we’ll be
the minority." And I said "We who?" and she said "We, you know, us,
normal people." (I shared an eye-roll with the Nigerian and Pakistani
students in front of me at that point.)

I recommend reading his whole story – it was funny.  And thought provoking.  Hopefully authors can continue to write the stories they do without having to be politically correct.  The day they have to change their words to be politically correct will be a sad day indeed.