Time is a limited resource. Beyond Memento Mori and all the philosophical jazz, we only have a certain number of hours in a day, and sleep and work/student life take a far too large chunk of that 24 hours, leaving us with a small amount of time to spend on hobbies and social engagements. But even that time is being fought over by outside forces.
Today, any business that deals with entertainment are not competing just over their customer’s wallets or other companies in the same sphere, but anything that seeks to divert potential consumer’s time away from everything else. Netflix recently stated their biggest competition isn’t Hulu, the upcoming Disney+, or traditional TV and cinemas, but Fortnite, and the hours that people spend on the Battle Bus rather than going through their Netflix queue. This battle for your attention is fought over now more than ever.
Your favorite podcast just posted a 2 hour special episode, its Tuesday and that means a new episode from that YouTube channel you love just got uploaded, and don’t forget that a special event is happening in a video game you play and that you need to log some hours into that or risk losing out on some exclusive items. All of this piles up with your standard daily workload while also trying to binge the newest show everyone is talking about so you can join in the conversation with your friends the next time you see them.
Among all of this though is one of the oldest forms of mass entertainment. That is the novel, the myth, the story itself. Full of worlds and characters just like us or wildly different. One of these most endearing traits is that despite the centuries of cultural and technological change, books have remained respectively unchanged. All that mattered was the writer behind the pen/typewriter/keyboard to craft the world in their image for readers to devour.
From a young age, I fell in love with books. Starting with getting lost in the shelves of my school library to building my own shelves to store all my tomes, it’s been a long affair. While other mediums like film, games, and music all made their attention injections in me at some point, I always had an unfinished book at my bedside table waiting to be reopened, the last read page dog-eared.
However, when I started college, my casual reading collapsed under the weight of all the new coursework and social experience around me. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I desperately craved to jump back into the world, but whenever I opened to one of the books on my desk, I got bored by the end of the first page. How can I sit down when there’s an app, YouTube vid, or anything else that may give you that instant hit of dopamine with minimal effort?
Reading, it seemed, was just another casualty of growing up.
Ironically, what finally did the trick was the most adult of all things adults do, my commute. During my first co-op, I had a decent T ride to the office and, wanting to save my podcasts for passing time at the office, I brought a book along with for the train ride instead. Having 20 minutes uninterrupted to sit and read forced me to engage in these books in a way sitting in my room with my laptop and tablet nearby couldn’t. Now I wasn’t giving books 60 seconds to convince me to stay longer, but handing over my undivided attention for almost half an hour. That was ample time for books to build settings and characters for me to become fully invested.
Character motivations and personalities seeped into my brain, places and situations both fantastical and all-too-real took shape in those underground transit tunnels.
Any decently written book can take you on a journey of your own imagination. Whereas streaming and movies give you all the visual information you need, novels leave just enough to the imagination to make the words more personal. Authors can be beautifully descriptive, but the lack of visuals allow our minds to fill in the gaps anyway we want. We have a perfect image of how we believe all the characters look and talk within the words of the page. I’m sure we’ve all that feeling of discomfort when a series we love is adopted for the screen and, regardless of the quality, there’s always that unfamiliar feeling what the actor or locations don’t quitelook how we imagined them to be. Our minds remain unpolluted by the imaginings of others.
Now we all have media and genre preferences, and being an avid reader does not you make you any better or worse than someone who doesn’t, but I’ve always been a believer in diversifying your media environment. If you were a massive reader before college and lost track, I urge you to delve back in, there’s plenty of good stories yet to be read. If you’re someone who’s never been bitten by the reading tick, comb through online lists and favorite genre recommendation to find one that you feel will best speak to you. The internet has allowed stories to be written and shared in new exciting formats as well. Perhaps you like having all your books on a small electronic tablet, that’s awesome. Maybe you have a webcomic you’ve found that has some incredible drawing to go along with an engaging narrative. Or maybe you gave in a looked up some fanfiction of a show you just finished and found a great alternative timeline tale where two characters who really should have gotten together finally do. Reading is only one part of who I am, and I still love binging new shows and spending a weekend grinding away at a video game, but all of these combine into what I feel makes me a more worldly person that can jump into any situation with excitement. I’ve always thought that fictional experience is the next best thing to the real deal.
Books have no inherent superior quality. While age can alter the properties of wine and cheese magnificently, books remain stubbornly immobile. Their simplicity and often single creator vision allow them to both spread far and touch people in a very personal way that most other forms of media cannot. So to you, my dear reader of the blog I hope I’ve inspired some latent desire to delve or return to the world of literacy and branch out into even more stories, people, and worlds.
In my next post, I’ll be delving a bit further into what brings to become fans of certain genres, and the fun of crossing over into one that once thought you weren’t a fan of. Until then, stay curious and vigilant my friends.
P.S. Shameless self-plug, if you are interested in following what I’m reading, or want me to check what books you’re exploring, go ahead and friend me on Goodreads! I’m planning on adding reviews to all the books I read this year. Excited to finally be on track to hit my reading goal this year. Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27682485-jake
P.P.S. If you’re looking for a great place to start reading, I cannot recommend my two favorite books from 2018 enough. Taking the fiction slot is Cambridge local Madeline Miller’s fantastic retelling of the Iliad from Patroclus’s POV, The Song of Achilles. Non-fiction wise, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s collection of incredible essays written over the course of the Obama administration, We Were Eight Years in Power. Feel free to message me on Goodreads for any more suggestions, or if you want to give me the title of something you’re reading now!
