In an active effort to combat the ever increasing hours spent hunched over a computer desk on the Internet or spouting vulgarities at my fellow gunmen over the PlayStation Network, I’ve pledged to return to a beloved childhood pastime: reading. The fresh scent of a mint-condition, unread book was duly missed. Who can forget the hardcover binding press-downs our teachers routinely guided us through in grade school? This will hopefully give me a chance to recapture my severely decayed literary skills. Perhaps considered to be an outdated medium of information and entertainment, I believe physical books won’t see the light at the end of the tunnel for quite some time. In my lifetime, yes, books may grow to be obsolete (the abundance of e-readers and Kindles out there are further developing this progress). Regardless, I vow to one day house my own library of books that I have accumulated over my lifetime; this will be setup in two, perhaps three mahogany-finish bookcases in my personal office room. (Like father, like son… though I question the majority of my father’s selections which house everything I wouldn’t, including the classic Encyclopedia Brittanica set, dissertations on polymer research, aging chemistry books, etc. A narrow breadth of these books cross over into more interesting choice areas such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, IQ testing and optical illusions.)
You know that colossal library that the Beast surprises Belle with in the classic Disney animation? The one with shelves stacked so high it would have likely taken a team of Nobel Prize scholars several dozen lifetimes to read through? I always thought that would be really cool to have. This was before I knew about computers though, and the convenience of accessing information, multimedia experiences, and un-imagineable worlds from several computing devices and a cable connection.
I can’t even begin to count how many Firefox bookmarks I plow through in my free time, all conveniently aligned in my Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar at a finger’s click away. It’s become a bit of a routine. Appreciation to the world-changing innovations the web has brought aside, I’ve always valued simplicity and order. This value is likely one of the contributing factors to my occasional impulses to organize my things. It can’t hurt to toss old bookmarked websites I no longer visit or to delete 7 of the 10 songs I don’t listen to from a rock band’s album. On the same token, it can’t hurt to divert some of my time away from the computer screen altogether, especially after having stared at two all day at work.
The surging speeds of internet browsers coupled with multiple tabbed sessions has really affected my attention span. With little patience to show for, I’ll just as easily close an article and switch to the next if either a) it’s littered with ads or is simply slow to load, or b) I lose interest. Its this instinctive ease to keep moving and find new Digged links, the next YouTube hit, or New York Times Opinion pieces that pushed me to return to books, at least for the time being. I hope to settle my mind and simplify my focus, yet honing my thoughts on issues I can really give some thought to.
I’ve finished reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and found Fooled by Randomness far more fulfilling) and The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman. I am now thoroughly enjoying The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, a young journalist from Brown coming from a lax Quaker and liberal upbringing who goes undercover at one of the most conservative and largest evangelical churches in the nation, Liberty University. Though initially put off when I read the author was still an undergraduate at Brown at the time of publishing, I thumbed through a few sections and determined younger than me or not, this guy’s writing was not only fantastic, but it instantly connected with me on several focal aspects of Christianity I was questioning myself. I’m about two-thirds of the way through.
I also made my first purchase of an issue of the Harvard Business Review for the train rides. It has done wonders to my intellectual ego.
