A Book is Not a Straight Line


My dad has this habit of reading non-fiction in, well, random order. He will read a passage here; skip to a totally different part of the book, read a piece there and so on. That approach never made any sense to me; and I assumed he did that because the topic or style of writing of most books didn’t appeal enough for him to want to read all of it.

Recently I heard of this proposal by Linda Holliday, the CEO of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear with her “a book is not a straight line” philosophy:
“Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel “the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages,” as publishers see it. “Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line,” she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. “They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book,” she said. “Is that so bad?”

Against which Alan Jacobs argued:
“(many topics) are complicated, entangled, interrelated, and for a society to thrive it needs to have many people — not all, but many — who have the patience and concentration to work through long narratives and arguments.”

What Jacobs says is true indeed. Then again, with complicated ideas, shouldn’t we want to hear different (preferably even opposing) perspectives before making up our minds? Instead of reading just one narrative that stitches the information together in the way that particular author thought? Because, let’s face it: most of us will never read two different books on the same complicated topic to get two different perspectives.

So I am in Holliday’s camp on this one. Apparently my dad’s been in that camp for a long while!

Comments

  1. KumarMarch 22, 2013 at 3:34 PM

    This kind of (random) reading actually helps in even serious subjects like physics, for example. It may be a good idea to keep reading randomly from the physics book, when not preparing for the course or test or the exam of course. One starts feeling a sense of familiarity, even if vague, about the broad aspects that the subject would deal with. In other words. It may be OK to develop a bird's eye view of the subject, so to speak, without even having much of a capacity to fly to start with! :-)

    I can draw a parallel in the world of Art. For a good artist, the canvas need not be blank when he starts with some painting. It can have patches of the anticipatory strokes of the artist which may transform and culminate into a great painting later on.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more