{"id":1734,"date":"2012-02-01T16:30:15","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T00:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2016-10-30T23:00:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-31T06:00:07","slug":"book-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/book-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Book thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I read this blog post<\/a> elsewhere, and it made me think. I suggest you go read it first. If you don’t want to know what I think, you don’t have to come back. It’s a fine article in itself.<\/p>\n

Back? OK.<\/p>\n

70 books a year is not a bad goal at all, and means that I should read about 6 books a month. Some people would say it’s an ambitious number, but it’s do-able, provided you do not select 900-page tomes all the time. But to quantify something like a to-read list is sobering, in a way. It draws needless attention to your mortality, and snubs all your claims of being “well-read”. I mean, seriously, at this rate, you are going to do a mere 1400 books in 20 years. It shows you how stupid your “best-of” lists are.<\/p>\n

The other thing that a number like this fails to take into account is rereads. One of my long-term goals was to read my favorite books all over again.\u00a0I am rereading\u00a0The Count of Monte Cristo\u00a0<\/em>at the moment. I was planning to begin reading\u00a0Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Little Women\u00a0<\/em>after I finish this, but the heart yearns for more Dumas. Others on the shortlist: His Dark Materials. \u00a0Lee Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language. From Balham to Bollywood.\u00a0<\/em>Let’s not even talk about comics and manga – there are too many on the reread pile at the moment. Do rereads count in the number put forth in the post? Needless information: the version of the Dumas classic that I am reading shows 1793 pages on the iPad. I am on page 499 at the moment, having spent about 2 days on it.<\/p>\n

It’s somewhat coincidental that I came across this relevant quote in Monte Cristo.\u00a0<\/em>In the section where Abbe Faria meets Edmond Dantes for the first time and dazzles him with his wisdom, he also has this to say about reading and knowledge:<\/p>\n

In Rome, I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library. By reading and re-reading them, I discovered that one hundred and fifty books, carefully chosen, give you, if not a complete summary of human knowledge, at least everything that is useful for a man to know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and rereading those one hundred and fifty volumes. I could recite you the whole of Thucyides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Strada, Jornades, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet.\u00a0 Observe, I merely quote the most important names and writers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This makes me shudder a little, to think that 150 books are all that matter. That can’t be right. Right?<\/p>\n

I am focusing on Step Five right now. Random Web surfing wasted a lot <\/em>of read-time. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.<\/p>\n

I totally disagree with Step Three. I need <\/em>to read multiple books at the same time, the more different the better. Often, I find myself switching from one book to the other in a single sitting, and it makes me appreciate both the books better, gives my mind more time to digest whatever I’ve read and be a little more excited about reading. It’s a kind of Attention Deficit Disorder thingie, but it always works for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I read this blog post elsewhere, and it made me think. I suggest you go read it first. If you don’t want to know what I think, you don’t have to come back. It’s a fine article in itself. Back? OK. 70 books a year is not a bad goal at all, and means […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3014,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions\/3014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}