Booking Through Thursday #1

Booking Through Thursday for 2/25/09

Suggested by Janet:

I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”

To what extent does this describe you?

There are parts of this quote that I agree with, and one major part that I don't agree with at all. I agree that reading of ones own free will is most definitely casting a vote. When I choose to read a book, that's exactly what I'm doing, choosing above all else, to curl up and do nothing but read that book. It's not an activity that for me, lends itself to multi-tasking. I do mark my "elsewhere" (the end of the book/adventure), and set off towards it. But I highly disagree that in doing that, I've made a comment about the place I've "left". Perhaps more so than at any other time in my life, I'm pretty damn happy and content with where I am, both in location and in my life at work and at home. I read for the pure enjoyment & curiosity of it, of sneaking a peek into the lives of others, of being made to feel from the words of another. I do it to experience different perspectives, to get another side of an argument, to go along for the ride of an experience I wouldn't otherwise be able to have. To visit an ashram in India, to solve a mystery with the use of forensic anthropology, to, for just a moment, live and work and play through the eyes of another. But when I close the book, I'm always delighted to be in exactly the same place I was before I opened it.