Reading is good

I read a lot as a child and I read a lot as an adult.  Reading feels industrious, though it produces nothing.  While reading, I am learning or being entertained.  In a minimum, I appear to be doing something, even if I am sitting in a chair barely moving.

When I graduated from college, the President of our university gave a speech at commencement.  He welcomed us “to the fellowship of educated men and women.”  I have never forgotten that phrase.  It sounded terrific then and it sounds terrific now.  What a wonderful thing to be a part of – the fellowship of educated men and women.  The welcome came with a suggestion: that each of us read a book every month.

Since then, I have kept track of every book I have read.  I don’t count magazines or comic books, though I count graphic novels (the Watchmen series is especially good).  I count volumes of poetry, which might be fewer than 100 pages (for instance “Green Squall” by Jay Hopler) equally with massive novels (like “War and Peace”).  I count all of the many baseball books I read, though none of the countless articles and blog posts.  I count all of the nonfiction I read, which comprises most of what I read.

I have a spreadsheet that lists every book I have read since June 1984.  In that time,  I have read an average of 35 books a year, as many as 59 books when I was single and unencumbered and as few as 21 when my children were young.  So far this year, the first year in 20 without children living in our house, I have read 25 books.

I can definitively state that I have read at least one book a month for the past 32 or so years.  This level of reading appears to be more than most of my friends, though much less than many avid readers and scholars.  Each year, some 2,000,000 books are published, roughly 500,000 of them in English.  At 35 books per year, I am rapidly losing ground.

It was been said of certain people that they had read every book written.  This was almost certainly never true because of how little interaction there was between east and west until after the Renaissance.  And it cannot possibly have been true since the creation of the printing press.  Still, there was a time, before the creation of the novel, when a European could have read virtually all of the consequential books hitherto written, basically the classics of Latin and Greek.

That is no longer possible, it isn’t even possible to read every book written on a topic.  My library system has 1452 books with the word “baseball” in the title.  It has 22,126 books with the word “history” in the title.  We are buried in books that have already been written and many more are on the way.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult.  Book reviews help.  Friends and family try to help, with recommendations or purchases.  Usually that distracts from what I want to read, sometimes it is downright annoying.  One year, my son gave me “The French Revolution: A History” by Thomas Carlyle.  He was young enough to pay attention to whether I read the book, so I read it.  It was excruciating.  I defy you to pick up the book, open to a random page, and find two sentences in a row that are comprehensible.  Though I am no fan of recommendations from others, I continually recommend books to others.

I have recently been pushing the book “Evicted.”  It is extremely well written and it describes a world that most middle class Americans are unfamiliar with:  a world of want, a world of existential worry, an underworld in the midst of our land of plenty.  Though nonfiction, the book reads like a novel with compelling highly flawed characters.  The book concludes with a prescription for solving the problems so eloquently conveyed by its author Matthew Desmond.  If you care about our country, you should read this book.  The experience will be enlightening, not excruciating.

I just finished the fascinating and elegant “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli.  It is only 81 pages and it will expand your understanding of the way the world works.

Two brief snippets to whet your appetite:

1. Rovelli describes with fluid prose the nuance and ramifications of Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. The ultimate conclusion being drawn from these theories at this time is that space is not empty but full of gravitational waves.  Gravity, by the way, remains inscrutable.  We know how to account for it, but we don’t know why it works.  Gravity is a theory, one that is utterly reliable.
2. Einstein is quoted as having written that people “who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” In essence, one chapter of the book talks about the flow of time and how it is different than our common place perception of it, essentially, that time does not exist.

It’s pretty heady stuff and worth the investment of a couple of hours, whether you are well versed in science or more in the nature of an English major.  I am the latter.

On page 43, Rovelli discusses loop quantum gravity and states that space is comprised of grains that are “a billion billion times smaller than the smallest atomic nuclei.”  This particular construct has always bothered me, even though I know perfectly well what is being stated.

I understand “two times bigger” or a “billion times bigger.”  In those cases, the things compared can be envisioned.  A basketball is bigger than a baseball, whether six or eight or 12 times bigger I don’t know.  But you can see each of them in your mind, you can envision eight baseballs and think, yea, a basketball is bigger than that.

But “two times smaller” is an impossibility.  You can envision a basketball, but what is two times smaller than a basketball.  If a basketball is the unit of measure, how can it also be the divisor of itself.  (No one would ever state that something weighs two times less than a pound.)  What is being conveyed, of course, is that the other thing is half as big as a basketball.  Then why not say that.  It is simpler, more direct, and less susceptible to quibbles from the likes of me.

That is the only complaint I have about the book.  It is otherwise exquisite.  Whether or not you read that particular book, read something.

The Violent Femmes sing in Lack of Knowledge, “Read read read read read read read everything you can read, learn learn learn learn learn learn learn everything you can learn.”  I like their music, I like their sentiment.  When you read, you learn.  Whether you read a book a month or a book a year, read something.