What I'm Reading

Read the Institutes in a year.

All the cool kids are doing it.

[ht: Meg]

Reading literature can change their lives — and ours. The thing is, we don’t quite understand how this process works — nor will we ever understand. Certainly we can’t predict it past a certain point. That’s why reading literature can’t be a discipline. I, a straight white American male, can see myself in a black character or a female one, understand a point made by a dead Russian or a living Albanian, meditate on an abstract point made by an anonymous author. But that equally means that an X reader (say, black, gay, Albanian) need not read an X author (or character?) to get something from a work. Reading literature doesn’t require us to check our list of identifying adjectives to see if we’ll understand. Instead, we just have to dive in. Maybe we’ll sink, maybe we’ll swim. Nobody can tell beforehand. That’s the beauty of books.

Interaction with literature can never be the basis of a systematic undertaking: It’s all too scattershot. All we can do is describe the sense of looking up from a page full of little black and white squiggles with the feeling that suddenly we understand our own lives, that names have been given to things that lacked them, and that the iron filings that hitherto were scattered about have configured into a clear pattern. Things are different now — somehow. Maybe that will cause us to act differently, maybe not.

“All brands want consumers to be their ‘friends.’ Oh, boy, do they!” But speaking for himself, he said he had reservations about the very premise. “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand,” he said. “It’s just stuff.”

[ht: Bethany]

[If you’re like most people, the number of people with whom you can carry on meaningful relationships is probably 148.5, give or take a few.

Unless, of course, you have a larger-than-normal neocortex.]

Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell - the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.

…Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that hold so much appeal?