a ramble on books


photo by troy holden.

i'm an old-fashioned woman inside.

its true. inside, i have the heart of a nerdy old librarian dressed in a green tweed jacket , hidden behind big black plastic framed glasses with stockings and clunky maryjanes to boot.

on work related activities, i love poring over research papers and sifting out new ideas, writing on the margins and trying to derive and convince myself of the mathematical results. i like gaining knowledge, and i especially like how research builds on research and tiny dots are connected across a large space, a small attempt at grasping an infinite horizon

on leisure, my favourite store to drop by in a mall or along any street lined with shops is a bookstore. i love wandering into the bookstore, browsing through shelves and shelves of books, picking up random pieces of writing and flipping through the pages. I like the fact that i can go into a bookstore without having an exact purchase in mind and yet be able to discover a hidden gem in the stacks, a book that somehow managed to leap out at me and greedily persuaded me into delving further beyond its cover.


i recently read an article on the NYT on e-books and book-sharing. (the article partly prompted this ramble on books...) and it was all about how with e-books, the ipad, iphone, kindle etc, book-sharing and discovering hidden gems of literature may be on the decline.
For example, on the train, you can't tell what the other person is reading if he's on his iphone or kindle (or maybe you can if you stood really close to him and read over his shoulder the whole time and scrutinized the text very carefully) there's no cover to indicate the book he's reading or attractive/catching illustration in front to grab your attention and make you wonder if that book would be interesting to you too. Online shops may also mean more targeted purchases since you don't get to view the plethora of books shelved adjacent to the one that you decided to purchase (although this second reason doesn't seem as compelling to me since online shops do sometimes encourage the wandering eye with listings on suggested reads or related literature. customer reviews on books are also an added advantage that your average bookstore doesn't have)

in truth, i don't think the evolutions in e-books would lead to less literary browsing or diminish the opportunities to chance upon new books. if anything, i think its the advances and ease of alternative forms of entertainment that's going to be driving down the discovery of new books to read. picture this, you're on a train and you see someone watching a movie on his iphone/psp etc. the moving picture is going to make you think "hey, that looks pretty interesting, i'm going to go download or rent that movie". if we read less today, its probably because we have alternative forms of entertainment that can provide more instantaneous gratification. i say this, because even though i'm old fashioned and shrouded in dusty tweed jackets, i do always play an exciting flash web-browser RPG game when i come home from work at night