What I do find interesting is that reading has been replaced in surprising ways through the use of audio books, podcasts and youtube videos.
I think that the two technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. The thing about a book that you can’t get from a discussion, is that a book is like a portrait as opposed to a photograph. A photograph you take and it’s done. A book, on the other hand, you can reread sections to add layers of understanding and work it over for a longer period of time. You still have the original image but there is a developing depth to it.
A book enables you to think and then rethink then think and then rethink, allowing you to go deeper in a book than you can, I might say, in any other medium.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t go deep in an audiobook, a podcast or a youtube video, or that there is no education utility in any of them.
If you can really read, you can read faster than you can listen, so reading is more effective except that you can’t read while you’re driving or doing the dishes or exercising so there these other media provide great utility.
Similar to the invention of the printing press, for the first time in human history, digital delivery of the spoken word has as large a reach and as long a duration as a book.
A book isn’t just a book, it’s not simply paper, it’s a portal. A book is your memory or your perception of the book.
If you look into the past, you can rank order books by the degree that they have influenced other books, so they are like citations in some sense.
The books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books. The ultimate canonical book in the west is clearly the biblical corpus because it has influenced virtually everything. You have to know it because it’s implicit in everything else and so you start there and gain its knowledge and it gives you the foundation.
Because we are in part historical creatures, these books are then about you, the patterns in the biblical corpus, are the patterns of your perceptions and actions and without understanding those patterns, you can’t know who you are and you can’t guide yourself properly through life.
It is not only about you now, but it’s about the you that can unfold across time in the best possible way so each of those works are a call to adventure.
