2009 Reading VIII
There was something else, I'm sure, but there was a lot of dipping into stuff over the last few weeks.
VIII: Ammon Shea, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary
Not this is something I recognise: the story of someone who decided to read the OED from cover to cover, over the period of a year. He emerges curiously unchanged - wearing glasses, paler, more knowledgeable about words, but his relationship survives it. He shares with us some of his favourite words - including Acnestis, I notice - and also shares his feelings on the joy of reading books:
"You cannot drop the computer on the floor in a fit of pique, or slam it shut. You cannot leave a bookmark with a note on it in a computer and then come upon it after several years and feel happy you've found something you thought you had lost. You cannot get any sort of tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages of a computer. (Maybe some people do get a tactile pleasure from rubbing their computers, but they are not people I have any interest in knowing anything about.)
... I've never sat down at a new computer and, prior to using it, felt a deep and abiding need to open it up and sniff it as deeply as I can...
I've never looked across the room at my computer and fondly remembered things that I once read in it. I can while away hours at a time just standing in front of my books and relive my favorite passages merely gazing at their spines. I have never walked into a room full of computers, far from home, and immediately felt a warm familiarity come over me, the way I have with every library I've ever set foot in ..."
And yet, and yet - this felt curiously forgettable - as if the world should have moved more.
VIII: Ammon Shea, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary
Not this is something I recognise: the story of someone who decided to read the OED from cover to cover, over the period of a year. He emerges curiously unchanged - wearing glasses, paler, more knowledgeable about words, but his relationship survives it. He shares with us some of his favourite words - including Acnestis, I notice - and also shares his feelings on the joy of reading books:
"You cannot drop the computer on the floor in a fit of pique, or slam it shut. You cannot leave a bookmark with a note on it in a computer and then come upon it after several years and feel happy you've found something you thought you had lost. You cannot get any sort of tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages of a computer. (Maybe some people do get a tactile pleasure from rubbing their computers, but they are not people I have any interest in knowing anything about.)
... I've never sat down at a new computer and, prior to using it, felt a deep and abiding need to open it up and sniff it as deeply as I can...
I've never looked across the room at my computer and fondly remembered things that I once read in it. I can while away hours at a time just standing in front of my books and relive my favorite passages merely gazing at their spines. I have never walked into a room full of computers, far from home, and immediately felt a warm familiarity come over me, the way I have with every library I've ever set foot in ..."
And yet, and yet - this felt curiously forgettable - as if the world should have moved more.