The crap/worth ratio

So, through out my life there have been periods of great reading and periods where I'll read one book in a year. As I've matured I've tried to make sure that I always have some time to read. One of the few great joys of commuting on public transportation is the free hour of reading each day that one is offered like an hors d'oeuvre at a wedding reception.

In the spirit of documentation, I've been recording all the books I've read since the mid '90s. Of course, books serve several different purposes. Any mathematician, indeed anyone with a liberal arts education, knows that books impart knowledge. However, most of what I read is fiction. Within the genre of fiction there are categorical differences as well. For instance, Charles Dickens probably fits in a different space than Judith Krantz. Don Delilo probably has more in common with Dickens than with Krantz. Harry Potter, though, well, that's more debatable.

Literature has an amazing transformative power. At the end of any great novel the reader is a different person than when they started. This is not necessarily the case when one is reading a silly little science fiction book about cats in space, or a Stephen King novel. Sure, technically neutrinos have passed through your body, and isotopes inside you have decayed, so really you are changed, but you haven't been transformed by the book in the same way that you would if you finished War and Peace or A Farewell to Arms.

So, I've recorded all the books I've read in the last ten years, and I've rated them all as crap or worth. Thus was born the crap/worth ratio. I try to keep it about one. That is, for every Game of Thrones (the best fantasy book since the lord of the rings) I try to read something valuable. Of course, literature is valuable, but so is Barbara Kingsolver. Douglass Adams is fun, but too fluffy for worth. (Oh, it's wonderful, and you should read everything he ever wrote in his short life, don't get me twisted.) Nick Hornby counts, and Vonnegut counts, and David Sedaris counts. Neal Stephenson only sometimes counts.

I'm making it seem like the other books are crap, and that's not really what I mean. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that when I reread Narnia a few years back it was for entertainment only. When I read Beth Lisick's Everyone into the Pool, sure it was entertaining, but it was a poignant memoir as well. I ruminated more about the human condition through the consumption of the memoir than the fantasy, even though C.S. Lewis' moral masterpiece is so grand in scope.

Read, read anything. With every other book, push your boundaries.

A long way down

I just finished an excellent book, 'A Long Way Down' by Nick Hornby. Fabulous fabulous, with it's themes of depression and community, this book is a great portrait of one of the base human themes of modern society. Plus, it's darkly humorous and a rollicking good read. Secondary themes of bibliophilia touched me in personal ways, as I've been reading more voluminously, and enjoying it correspondingly more as well. I highly recommend it. It's intriguing, smart, easy, fun, and fundamental.

Existence is hard. We are very smart, and we know how to compare our situations to others. The other situations don't even have to be real, we can still compare. And therein lies the sorrow. Why isn't my life better, and more like something else? One tactic I've been using is seeing the little flowers that are hidden in the grass, the ones that are so small you don't really notice them unless you happen to be sitting or lying in the grass. You have to look really closely, but there is something beautiful there. Even sitting in line, or on a bus, or having a harsh day at work, when I get a second to stop and think, I can always find a little flower.

I thought this would just be a little trick in an arsenal of personal existence strategies, but it turns out to be very useful over all. You know how stress relief helps alleviate everything from allergies to insurance rates? The ripple effect from this observational paradigm shift has had a similar effect on my outlook.

Great books are nice too.