Time Out!

Books You Will Probably Never Read

Books and Electronic Culture
I have called this book review blog "Books You Will Probably Never Read" because most people will pass right by it. I am very fearful that today's American culture will make the book obsolete. The electronic culture of text messaging, TV, the Internet, video games, DVD movies, Ipods, talk radio, cell phones that take pictures, movies and provide snippets of TV shows, etc., is taking thought and ideas out of daily life. Even the newspaper has been "dumbed down" with large pictures on the front page, little text, and whatever text is left over for the middle pages squeezed by advertisements. Today's greatest pollution is advertising. Books are not interrupted by advertisements.

Reading books requires sustained thought, reflection, visualizing, the ability to apply abstract ideas. American culture today has little time for reading books and therefore, for thinking. American electronic culture is killing the American spirit, which is, I'm afraid, beyond resurrection. After all, Steve Jobs of Apple, Inc., has put his hand on the pulse of American culture with the words, "No one reads anymore."

My Favorite Books
I decided to review the books I have read during my lifetime. Obviously, there are so many books that I have read and reflected on that my life will run out before I will be able to review all the books I have read. But I wanted to leave a record of the ideas that I have found in books. Abraham Lincoln's "The things I want to know are in books" is a cliche now, but that is how I feel about books. Books are ideas. Ideas are exciting. Ideas are meant to be applied.

Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures!

It's heresy to say so, but books and ideas are much superior to pictures. It's true that a picture of a metal post underpinning a highway with a large, rusted crack along its surface says better than any text that the post is in danger of collapsing, but the ideas needed for building a structurally sound post to replace it are engineering ideas, aided perhaps by illustrations, but abstract ideas nonetheless. When Clark put together his TV documentary, Civilization, he admitted that he did not include much about law or economics because he could not find pictures that would visualize their ideas.

A Consistent Format

When I began this blog about a year ago, I did not have a clear format for how to review the books, a format that would be relatively brief, but that would showcase the ideas and purposes for reading the book. I eventually developed one:

1. Why read it?

2. Sample ideas from the book.

3. Final quotes.

For the first half of the blog, my format was inconsistent, so I am returning to some of my earlier books to put them into the format that I later developed which should make the books and their ideas attractive to short-on-time readers.

Tomorrow: How to find time to read.