2017 Reading List, and Why We Read

Books I read in 2017:

...

Yeah, there's nothing here.
I did alot of things in 2017, but regrettably, reading wasn't one of them. I think I was working my way through S.M. Stirling's Nantucket series at some point, but I never finished the trilogy, and I may have only been reading those in 2016 anyway.

As I'm thinking about it, I believe I also read Brent Weeks's The Blood Mirror, book four of his Lightbringer series, and a couple other's as well, a few of Stephen Baxter's books in the Xeelee sequence- though again, I may be conflating with the previous year.

I used to read more. Back in college, I would consume books, lose myself in them. Over time, I've fallen into the habit of getting most of my entertainment from movies and shows-- and though I still read, its all mostly scholarly, or news articles.

In short, I'm ashamed, but there's no point dwelling on the past.

Though I don't typically make resolutions, reading more this year could certainly be called one; I've gotten off to a good start. Gyo, a graphic novel by Junji Ito, and Ra by Sam Hughes (known better as 'qntm', from his blog Things of Interest) in this month alone-- and I'm slowly working my way through House of Leaves at the moment. All three I recommend, though I'll go more into detail about them when I do another reading list post at the end of the year. If I keep myself honest, there will be more than just those three as well.

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Why do we read?
What is it about the printed word transcribing the narrative form that has so outlasted and outshined every other comparable medium over the millennia, or has so exemplified depth, and sophistication where others can be, and often are written off as jejune?

It is true that books weren't always the primary storytelling medium- obviously before the advent of writing, there were still narratives, passed down in songs and stories of oral tradition. And though even early on writing was used to record important works of fiction and philosophy alike, it was centuries before the common man was literate-- and it has always been the common man who is the true audience of fiction.

Bards and playwrights played storytellers for much of history; its only the past handful of centuries that the novel has rained supreme.

But why?

Why is it that the novel was not replaced by cinema, television, radio, graphic novels, blog posts or meta-fiction? Why are most contemporary popular films and TV shows based in-part, or outright on books that came long before them?

I have a couple ideas. First and foremost is the obvious-- anybody can write a book. Writing a book takes only time and, I suppose, something to write about. Not everyone can write a good book, but the medium is inherently accessible. All other mediums fall short in this metric, and the result is that most of the world's fresh ideas will be born on paper long before someone decides to throw enough money at them to turn them into something else.

However, I think the real picture here is more than just economics.
When you read a book, you're effectively processing a kind of code; like punchcards being fed into your brain through your eyes (or fingers, I suppose, if you're reading braille)-- and that code is telling your brain how to construct a world, a narrative on its own. Visual media, comics, movies, etc., are showing you someone else's vision. This is why it is so easy to turn your brain off as you watch something. It is virtually impossible to read this way. If the brain looses focus while reading, you'll find yourself at the end of a paragraph your eyes continued to scan without any knowledge of its contents.

One could argue that this is because words are a more primitive means of conveying thought, and thus can offer more subtle meaning and structure. The continuation of this thought is then that, as the written word is simply a means of conveying the spoken word, which came first of course, that then, a spoken dialogue, or any narrative transmitted orally should be the ur medium, the most primitive form of story-telling, and thus also the most sublime.

This is false.

The reason is subtle, but important. Books differ from other media (except for graphic novels*) in a matter of time. That is, films, for instance, or music, or a spoken dialogue, all proceed through time at a steady rate-- and, more importantly, can only be consumed linearly, one instant at a time.
Yes, you can rewind a movie to watch the same scene over again, but you can still only process what you're viewing one frame at a time at a constant rate.

Words on paper (or screen) function differently.
We do not read one letter at a time, our brains process words as a whole; for example, this quote is often passed arround:

"It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

- That said, curiously, if one attempts to slowly process each word, the text becomes illegible, but if you just let your eyes scan across the lines, it reads without trouble.

Beyond this, when reading, even the individual words aren't wholly important. Our brains process sentences as complete thoughts- obviously, you can't think about a whole sentence until you've read all of it, so while the brain keeps a running dialogue in its head, the complete thought isn't fully processed until after the punctuation. And books, unlike other media, are perfectly suited to being set down and paused for an arbitrary amount of time, at any point, giving the reader as long as they need to process each thought.

And so too, even beyond the sentence, beyond the paragraph, an entire page of a book exists in situ, allowing the eyes to dart back and forth, up and down, back to previous statements as needed. When reading something particularly thick, we may scan a line several times in-order to fully grasp its meaning.

This, in a way, loops back to the idea of accessibility. If you're watching a film, or listening to a lecture, and something stated goes over your head, you have little recourse to backtrack, or pause to digest, in part because these media rely on a flow, and stopping it is disruptive to experiencing them. But a reader sets his or her own flow.

I've mused on this topic enough for now, I think.

* Graphic novels share more in common with cinema than with textual novels, though they exist somewhere in between. More on that later. Suffice to say, despite existing frozen in time as textual narratives do, graphic novels have a different sort of pacing to them, and are processed differently by the mind as they are read- again, not unlike a film, only with a frame-rate dictated by how fast one can turn a page.