I've been a bibliophile my entire life. Now in my 70's. I became enamored with Ayn Rand at age 16 and read Atlas Shrugged about every 5 years. Always something new in my old underlined, list of paragraphs. I think I am 2 years behind because we seem to be living too much of it!
In 2013 when I had to painfully downsize I had 20k books, not bad for an amateur. Of course I love your post! And read every word.
My favorite kind of book is a secondary historical work, one written as a summation of primary sources for historians, with minimum opinion. To say the market for such things is tiny is to understate. You're not going to find what I like as a book on tape. In fact, most of my purchases over the years have been used books. Way cheaper and readily available, castoffs from universities and such. It's interesting to note how what was considered a tertiary work for 'end user markets' as we would say today, published to actually make money in the 1960s, would be borderline unreadable to most. 1100 pages of "The Campaigns of Napoleon" was what I was reading at 5.
I suppose one thing I can say is that the amount of material i've been able to acquire has benefited from the decline in reading. Then I think of all the works that will never be written as a result. Most of these works will never make it online. At least Proust, Monty Python jokes notwithstanding, will be remembered.
“But, the sheer length provides a connection that you won’t get with short-form text, or media nowadays. After spending thousands of pages in the world of this author’s creation you feel an odd kinship with the guy. With the characters of the world you’ve been immersed in.”
This chimes with me- reading books written by classic authors seems the only way to open up a genuine window into the time period or to understand a lesson about human nature that is still relevant today e.g. Dostoyevsky in Tsarist Russia, Dickens in Victorian England
English was always my favorite class in high school. Even though I ended up pursuing different avenues of higher education, I've kept my fondness for reading into adulthood which has preserved my attention span while very few people around me bother with any kind of intellectual writing at all. Books really are like time machines that can transport you to a bygone era. As a kid it always felt like a surreal experience, imagining the scenes and words with my head. Shout out to all the literati out there on subtack and elsewhere, I'll never stop reading.
I've been a bibliophile my entire life. Now in my 70's. I became enamored with Ayn Rand at age 16 and read Atlas Shrugged about every 5 years. Always something new in my old underlined, list of paragraphs. I think I am 2 years behind because we seem to be living too much of it!
In 2013 when I had to painfully downsize I had 20k books, not bad for an amateur. Of course I love your post! And read every word.
My favorite kind of book is a secondary historical work, one written as a summation of primary sources for historians, with minimum opinion. To say the market for such things is tiny is to understate. You're not going to find what I like as a book on tape. In fact, most of my purchases over the years have been used books. Way cheaper and readily available, castoffs from universities and such. It's interesting to note how what was considered a tertiary work for 'end user markets' as we would say today, published to actually make money in the 1960s, would be borderline unreadable to most. 1100 pages of "The Campaigns of Napoleon" was what I was reading at 5.
I suppose one thing I can say is that the amount of material i've been able to acquire has benefited from the decline in reading. Then I think of all the works that will never be written as a result. Most of these works will never make it online. At least Proust, Monty Python jokes notwithstanding, will be remembered.
This passage:
“But, the sheer length provides a connection that you won’t get with short-form text, or media nowadays. After spending thousands of pages in the world of this author’s creation you feel an odd kinship with the guy. With the characters of the world you’ve been immersed in.”
This chimes with me- reading books written by classic authors seems the only way to open up a genuine window into the time period or to understand a lesson about human nature that is still relevant today e.g. Dostoyevsky in Tsarist Russia, Dickens in Victorian England
English was always my favorite class in high school. Even though I ended up pursuing different avenues of higher education, I've kept my fondness for reading into adulthood which has preserved my attention span while very few people around me bother with any kind of intellectual writing at all. Books really are like time machines that can transport you to a bygone era. As a kid it always felt like a surreal experience, imagining the scenes and words with my head. Shout out to all the literati out there on subtack and elsewhere, I'll never stop reading.
i was mislead to believe this article would be sexy. i can't goon to this at all. just a bunch of words and pictures of books. what a load of crap.