I think this is part of a larger point. Books aren't just collections of facts. Deleuze and Guattari perhaps said it best in the introduction to "A Thousand Plateaus" - "A book itself is a little machine..."
They then go on to say: "We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with..." Books are machines you plug into your understanding of the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all. What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more important than the content of the book itself under this view.
But a book is not a person. A book does not have experiences. A book does not think or live.
There's a mechanistic, reductionist point of view that runs throughout many of the HN comments here that I find really disturbing.
A lot of people seem to think that we are just machines. If we are, then sure, replacing one machine with another that works the same and has the same "data" might be unproblematic, but I don't share such a bleak and narrow view of humanity. To think and feel is not just to run a program on a computer.
I view a book as a machine for producing knowledge, ideas, and affects. Writing in the book is, for me, standard machine operation that does not impair its usefulness.
Sure, and I've been deeply affected by books, but I'm not going to start using that as a basis for an argument a book and a human think in exactly the same way
> And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences
It was interesting to read this part. I'm not sure if this is even such a valid assumption for non-fiction anymore, given what we've learned about psychology and how people use books.
People read for so many reasons that we're just starting to understand. Just a few examples:
- To be able to say they read that book, to a given person, or for a given social or technical process. "Have you read X?" "Yes, it was an interesting book" and done, purpose reached.
- To not be caught not knowing about things. In this case even "yeah, I recognize what you're saying--that's an idea from the book you shared with us" is easily enough.
- To soak in, rather than to learn (intuiting a concept vs. mapping it out, for example)
- To experience the energy/vibe/mood of the text; perhaps they are in an analogous mental state. I am often drawn to read computer programming books when I need to schedule or organize my daily work using logical if/then processes, for example.
- To exercise their subjective imaginative capacity, e.g. converting words to imagined examples, imagery, or experiences
- To limit their exposure to dopamine, for example picking reading from sets of other tasks like finger painting, or playing a group-learning game
- To express their identity, e.g. "I'm a big reader, look at these books I'm working on" when it may otherwise be in doubt, for example
And those are just some of at least hundreds that are broad enough to make useful categories which aren't too limiting.
With books serving this many capacities, IMO it's easier to see why the concept of books "working" can be broken in a given way. Especially "learning" which is one of the more historical cases, with books serving as repositories of knowledge.
But it also highlights senses in which one can say, "look, I'm not learning a thing here, and I know it, but I'm still reading this." IOW "books don't work" doesn't work in some important ways, and it could be that this is worth knowing, either for audience selection or other reasons.
I think everything you're saying is correct, but doesn't discredit what the post says. I think even books we don't necessarily resonate strongly with can have small, hidden impacts on our behaviour and thinking. They might give us an example of what a person does in a certain situation, and we internalise how we might respond in a certain situation. In this I think it is kind of similar to an LLM, where we kind of predict what our response to something should be, drawing from our past experiences on an abstract level.
I think books we do resonate with can have a larger impact for the reasons you mentioned, but I think they all have an impact.
I like to think of books as planets, and you're a spaceship. If you're not paying attention, as you graze a planet it'll slightly alter your course. Maybe in perceptibly so. If you are aware of it and resonate with it, you can kind of use its gravity to swing you into a different direct -- presumably onto a direction you want to go in.
> What does it mean to have read a book? To read every single word and symbol? To understand the key ideas and points?
To understand what the author thought at the time, what he was trying to say, what he had said really, how he came to his ideas, ... One cannot predict what he'll find in a book before book will be finished. You cannot know what you do not know. The only way is to read it through.
Sometimes I read books twice in a row. From the title to the last page. With all the "thanks", with the contents section, even leafing through a section of literature. Because you never know what you might find.
When I need just key ideas from a book I could find them in internet, because someone have them written in her blog. It would take, probably, 10 minutes to read, and why to bother myself with the book?
> Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?
Well, terminologically (which is not the exact focus), because 'book' is the «medium»: 'book' comes from "bark" ("beech") and as such intends the container; the context could be called 'text' ("the weaving of ideas").
So, on the actual point:
-- the distinction involving "vinyl" and "opticals", "music" and "movies" on the one hand, and books on the other, is simply that relatively little option for the "storage of words" has fused the ideas of "books" and "texts" more closely.
-- and going towards the point of the quote, there is an actual experience of the object, an appreciation, which is important to some. You have a parallel in "music and movies", but it is not in the container, it is in the "reproduction equipment" - theater vs mobile vs television vs projector etc.
Ok, to me it is obvious because words are themselves symbols - and thus everything that we can describe, and reason about, is symbolic. Us discussing here is symbolic, and a book is a complex, structured, symbolic message. Even if my understanding and your understanding of a particular word may differ somewhat, and there is subjective subsymbolic meaning (e.g. when I read “love”, I tie it with my life experience, and yours is nothing alike), when you compose complex messages those nuances lose importance.
If you read War and Peace, and I read War and Peace, even if our experience of the reading might be slightly different, it will be due to how we react to it, and to which passages we tend more attention; and we will generally agree on what Tolstoy wanted to communicate - not only on the words themselves, but on the world constructed, and the implications of it that are not explicitly described.
Another way to look at it: we don’t have any evidence that we need more than a symbolic approach to replicate what we do with language: and we have built a whole civilization based on written education, which is based in symbols.
Reading books is more than just looking at words on paper instead of a screen. At least in fiction, the process of understanding the world an author has created makes the story completely personal to you in a way that a movie never can be, because the imagined version of the settings and events is completely your own.
In this way, when a really well done book impacts you with some profound lesson about life or the human condition, it hits a million times harder because you've been living in that book's world and are emotionally invested.
The power of a good book is more than just ordinary transmission of information, it's delivering profound thoughts, emotions, and ideas packaged inside the context required to understand them.
Thanks, that's a very insightful way to think about it. Reminded me of PG's "How You Know" (http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html), where he points out that not being able to recall information from a book doesn't mean that the book was "useless", because the process of reading a book weaves it into your subconscious model of the world.
Makes me feel a lot better about all the time I've spent reading books that I can't immediately recall the details of.
> maybe reading should be like listening to music:
Massumi's introduction to his translation of A Thousand Plateaus (selected paragraphs by me, it's a lot longer than just this of course):
> This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?
> Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
> The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record.
That’s a pretty weak argument. You are saying that I should invest time and effort into a book to understand it, but also that the purpose of literature is not information.
What is there to understand then, if not information? I always hear the author is making a point about life, but why water it down in hundreds of extra pages instead of saying it directly?
The only thing I can think is that the story helps us connect with the author’s point and learn from it better. It can influence and persuade in a way that just laying out arguments can’t, because it stirs up emotion in the reader. Is that what you are trying to say?
I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced something like that from a book, but it sounds enjoyable. Maybe I’ll give it another shot sometime.
If after reading an entire book you haven’t already internalized its main thesis, it’s probably not a very valuable thesis.
But reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely?
Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.
Fabulous line: The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
They then go on to say: "We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with..." Books are machines you plug into your understanding of the world and they either have an effect on you or they have no effect at all. What and how a book plugs into your understanding and works on it is more important than the content of the book itself under this view.
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