# 49: Books Will Stay in a Complex World
Story behind the “Passage”
This morning a friend sent me a message in response to what I wrote on the blog yesterday about reading. He asked: “Will there be a post-books era since we are already talking about the post-facts age all the time?” I said: “No, I do not think so. Books will become even more important in the future. We will see a revival, even post-Corona.”
Why would I think that if I wrote so vehemently about the decline of reading yesterday? If even the learned and educated and supposedly intellectual people have such a narrow definition of reading just what seems to have been written “for them,” who could save the books? The kids that are going to listen to all the stories during the “Day of Reading” in Germany today? The ‘older’ generation that is going to live longer because of the demographic pyramid?
Yes — all of them and many more. As you will see below, I am going to provide three very easy answers to why I think that books will experience a revival or at least survive. And survival is also the keyword for Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I had to think of the book when trying to find something in my shelf that stands for the ultimate value of finding wisdom in one slim book. And The Elements is like the incarnation of this.
The book was recommended to me by one of my American Studies professors in an Essay class. Actually, my memories of this class are not so happy because as far as I remember, my performance was below my expectations. (“Well, this is why she started writing a blog now, no other alternative…”) Actually, I took the class because we had to take it as part of the curriculum. And I took it with this particular professor because I admired him very much for how he lectured in the weekly lecture class for all students and I liked his personality. Actually, I still do.
In one of the sessions, he recommended books that would help us get better at essay writing. And I remember how he praised the Strunk and White book as a “timeless classic.” Well, I now wonder if lecturers still do that — recommend books? As a student, I was always happy about the reading lists and the book recommendations. It is weird to think of this today but I really treated these recommendations like the holy grail of learning. How else would I have known which books/texts to consult? These selections came from people I trusted and they were available in the university library or you could get them online quickly because they counted as standard study books.
That was about 15 years ago. And the last time I held the book in my hands was a few months ago when I graded papers. Even though I recommend the book in my class sessions when we talk about final papers, I stressed this book in particular when one student asked me again for helpful sources. “It is a slim book and very old,” I said. “But it is timeless and if you know what is written there, you basically know everything you need to know.” This is what I said and I almost sounded like my professor from back in 2005.
The story behind The Elements mirrors a similar generational divide. The original book was written by William Strunk in 1918, a professor of English. He only published it privately for his classes. Twenty years later, it was rediscovered by E.B. White, a former student of Strunk. And in the edition I own, you find a foreword by the stepson of White, Roger Angell. He writes about how his stepfather used to write a weekly column for the New Yorker and always spent hours pondering over his text until it would satisfy his self-set expectations of brevity and clarity — which it hardly ever did.
The screenshot above shows the back cover of the book. It is not from one of the chapters this time because I do not want to talk about grammar or style in my text today. I want to discuss the value that books create. And from my perspective, only the value of anything will help that anything to survive in the long run. And survival in a world of free trade with global market competition always means that this anything needs to be better than or at least equally valued by consumers as other alternatives. And in the case of books, I truly think they stand the test, against all odds.
But since you know me, my explanation for this does not come from some hyper cultural and intellectual corner in which people usually talk about “cultural artefacts” and “high culture” and whatever. Even though I understand and share most of these arguments, I do want to talk more about the practical value of books for education and daily work practice. And the testimonials on the cover of The Elements speak volumes with respect to the timeless value of books.
My Learnings
“Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It’s as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility.” There are actually two very important ‘elements’ in this very short sentence that go along with my argument. The first one is “enjoying” it. This might sound completely strange to people who have to continuously force themselves to read. But I think, the problem behind that is that they choose the wrong books. There are books for everyone. You just have to find them. And we are all humans with the same DNA. So, our attention span is very much alike which means that a certain level of arousal caused by some information will make us respond.
Now, responding can take place in a positive or negative way, whereby these are evaluations, of course. What I mean: You can read a text and get upset about it or you can laugh, cry, etc. All these are emotional responses. And then there are texts which do not cause any conscious emotional reaction. This, one might generally think, holds true for non-fiction works or textbooks in which you read about facts. After reading these kinds of books, you might not feel any immediate emotional response but a feeling of fulfilment and satisfaction because you have learned something.
All these cases, however, are connected by the fact that you need to truly concentrate on the text in order to have some sort of response. And this opens the door for pleasure and enjoyment to follow. It truly does not matter if you like laughing or crying or learning. Nobody cares. It is your subjective feeling of gaining gratification from reading that turns into a value for you. And this value will make you open a book again. If you do not get to this point, of course, the opposite will happen and you do not see a point in turning towards a book. Still, this aspect of joy in whichever way you define it is a strong a value created by books. “Why only books?” you might ask now.
It is true that other forms of reading might lead to a similar feeling of gratification, no doubt. But this is where the second issue becomes important: “volubility.” At the time when this testimonial was written at the turn of the millennium, our world was still a lot more quiet. Just imagine if the reviewer from the NYT would look at today’s world full of social media noise and other voices in the middle of the attention economy. In this environment, you find short pieces of writing — content — everywhere. You can hardly escape it — only when you turn off your cell phone and other media and you flee into the woods in a Thoreauvian manner...
And this abundance of media content, the so-called information overload, is exactly the reason for my argument why books will survive and even gain importance in the future. This sounds counter-logical? Why would people buy and read books if they are already being bombarded with all kinds of writings? Is it not completely likely that the trend towards “short, quick, and nice-looking” will continue? After all, startups such as Blinkist in Berlin are hugely popular. They offer summaries and audio podcasts about books. Although they claim that they cause more people to actually buy and read books, I am skeptical.
The point is: There will be more companies offering services like this, there will be millions and billions more articles and short blog entries giving you the best summaries with the major 3–5 points of a book. But all this will not satisfy you anymore. Because you will increasingly see that there is something missing. You do not learn anymore. And you know that simply reading a short summary of a book is simply not like reading the book yourself. This is where my argument begins and there are two core values connected.
COMPLEXITY REDUCTION
The first major value of books is that they function as filters in the complex world. Yes, you can get all the “content” everywhere on the web but you increasingly find yourself in a complete nirvana of choices. And in the end, you click on many different websites with different longer and shorter summaries and then you end up thinking: “Well, is this really it?” And then you keep searching and watch a clip here and listen to a podcast there and in the end, you spend hours on this. You are trying to make sense of he information overload but unconsciously, you end up jumping around between so many websites and online media that you cannot remember, even a day later, where exactly you read information A or B. If you then happen to actually read a book again, you suddenly notice: Wow, there is so much more in this book than I find online. And it is all there on 200 pages. It stays there. I can come back to it. If I look closely, this original source is so much clearer than all the other stories I read. I have the feeling I know a lot more about the topic than people who “just” read online.
QUALITY ASSURANCE
This is something that goes along with the information overload. Yes, you will certainly become a fan of online sources that somehow meet your personal quality criteria, websites, and companies that you trust for whatever reason. Still, since there are so many offers, you will always encounter new sites and you will stop getting into a deep research about them just to find out if they are trustworthy. So, if a book has been published by a press (I am thinking a lot about the publishing market these days) and been reviewed by people with a certain expert status, you at least know that what you are reading is no complete bullshit. And remember: if you only learn bullshit, you will be known as a bullshitter yourself. You have no other choice if you stop learning yourself.
LEARNING
This last point is my most powerful one. Learning happens in the breaks. Do you know this wisdom? You might know it from sports, where your muscles grown in-between practice. But you also know it from learning how to play an instrument. Basically, you can transfer this finding to anything that human beings are capable of learning. And the reason behind this is simply our brain. Our brain wires take time to connect and our myelin grows in relaxation phases between practice. Since we are usually forced to put away a book several times because we have no time to read for 5 hours or more straight, many breaks occur. And these are important.
In the break periods, two important things take place. We digest what we have read. This might happen completely passively. And we might continue thinking about the content and even exchange our ideas with others. As every teacher in the world knows, asking questions is the best way to learn — I mean, especially on the part of the students asking, not just answering, questions. This raises the level of attention and it awakens the natural curiosity that we as humans have programmed into our DNA. So, the breaks are the times when we really make use of our readings and these periods are also the ones when ‘heureka’ moments occur out of the blue when your brain wires are connecting information in unprecented ways.
Does that not clearly answer why we read at all?
Maybe our explicit intention is not learning in the first place. It might just be fun or distraction, as I wrote above. Still, all this will, if we plan it or not, make us learn something and the insights we derive from this — they make our lives worthwhile. They make it interesting and exciting. They make us human; as beings who can actually improve their own living conditions without relying on other creatures or even metaphysical powers to navigate us into our future.
So, next time when you Google a word or a question, just remember: As soon as you find the name of some author and a book title mentioned in the online content you see — be suspicious. There is something that all of these authors that are writing about the books have missed. And this missing element is the one that will improve your life and your career. But the only one who can detect it in the BOOK is
YOU.
Reflection Question
1) Without scrolling up again: Which of my arguments in support of the lasting value of books do you find most convincing?
2) If you never read books — try to remember a book that was recommended to you by someone recently. Remember how the person came to recommend it to you. Was it a question you had or a topic that both of you liked?
3) When did you last feel like a child that completely loses any sense of time and place when playing?