Bookish Dept.

A nice bit from Timothy Egan at the Times about the pleasures of reading and printed books, even in the digital age.  He also takes time out to swipe at the probably-erroneous stats about who reads and who doesn't, and gives a little uplift as well:  "[Reading is] fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious."  (My favorite quote from the comments: "Forty percent of Americans do not vote. Does that mean that we have no elections in the United States?")

The one thing I can be compelled to spend money on without thinking too hard about it is a book.  Granted, writing for AMN has made it possible for me to not have to shell out as much money for some of the books I'd want to read — but that's only freed me up to pursue a nearly-bottomless well of other bookish fascinations.  Most of them center around Japan or a few of my other fields of deep and abiding interest (movies, music, etc.) — and anything that I don't keep, I can usually give away to someone I know who'll benefit from it.

The notion about "hard-wired for story" — that's something I'd love to see a neurologist or another scientist comment on.  I suspect there's a lot of truth to it; we respond more strongly to a narrative of some kind than we do a dry recitation of fact.  There's just something about a narrative that makes the synapses light up in a way that's heavily primal, both in the sense that it addresses something primitive in us collectively and that it plugs into something that reminds us of the way we were when we were young (that is, if we aren't already young to begin with).

The downside of that, of course, is that we're also prone to believing in narratives that may be enthralling on their own terms but have no connection with reality at all.  Sometimes this is innocuous, like SF/fantasy/anime fans who talk about a given character as if he/she/it were real.  Sometimes it's far less so, like the person who believes he's being watched by government agencies and tapes tinfoil over his windows.  The idea of our lives being stories that we tell ourselves is something that was touched on in Why They Kill; small wonder I come back to that book a great deal.  (There's a great deal in it that I'd like to embody in a story someday, but I haven't yet reached the point where I could talk about it coherently.)