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title:: Books/How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read icon:: 📖 purchased:: start:: end:: published:: length:: author:: cover:: - Idea of maintaining perspective - Reading book a day collapsed:: true - You see, I had been thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I would be bound to get to the end sometime and then, even if I had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. - But what do you suppose the librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in sight, and I asked him how many books they had in this crazy library? Three and a half million, he tells me. - We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I’ll spare you the details, but I checked it out later in the office, with pencil and paper: **it would take me ten thousand years to carry out my plan.** - Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe. - ‘The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the table of contents. **Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,’ he explained. ‘==He’s bound to lose perspective.==’** - **it is his love of books—of all books—that incites him to remain prudently on their periphery**, for fear that too pronounced an interest in one of them might cause him to neglect the others. - The wisdom of this position lies first of all in the importance it accords to totality, in its suggestion that to be truly cultured, we should tend toward exhaustiveness rather than the accumulation of isolated bits of knowledge. - **Rather than any particular book, it is indeed these connections and correlations that should be the focus of the cultivated individual**, much as a railroad switchman should focus on the relations between trains—that is, their crossings and transfers—rather than the contents of any specific convoy. - ==relations among ideas are far more important than the ideas themselves.== - culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others. **what counts in a book is the books alongside it.** - This distinction between the content of a book and its location is fundamental, for it is this that allows those unintimidated by culture to speak without trouble on any subject. #map - #projectidea map of all American literature. Relationship of all ideas - It can be argued, then, that a book stops being unknown as soon as it enters our perceptual field, and that to know almost nothing about it should be no obstacle to imagining or discussing it. - What distinguishes the non-reading of Musil’s librarian is that ==his attitude is not passive, but active.== - non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught. - the person not reading abstains, like Musil’s librarian, in order to grasp the essence of the book, which is how it fits into the library as a whole. In so doing, he is hardly uninterested in the book—to the contrary. It is because he understands the link between content and location that he chooses not to read, with a wisdom superior to that of many readers, and perhaps, on reflection, with greater respect for the book itself. - ==appropriate time span for reading a book is ten minutes==, after which you risk forgetting that the encounter is primarily a pretext for writing your autobiography. To an artist so creative as the critic, **what does subject-matter signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the painter.** #boom - what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books (which is the only way, in all probability, to speak well about them), our perception of these situations changes strikingly.I’m - Location is compressed Content #Fundamental Problem of Compression collapsed:: true - the content of a book is in large part its location. - For instance, I’ve never “read” Joyce’s Ulysses,7 and it’s quite plausible that I never will. The “content” of the book is thus largely foreign to me—its content, but not its location. **Of course, the content of a book is in large part its location.** This means that I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey,8 that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin in the course of a single day, etc. And as a result, I often find myself alluding to Joyce without the slightest anxiety. - My intellectual library, like every library, is composed of gaps and blanks, but in reality this presents no real problem: it is sufficiently well stocked for any particular lacuna to be all but invisible. - Collective Library collapsed:: true - Most statements about a book are not about the book itself, despite appearances, but about the larger set of books on which our culture depends at that moment. - It is that set, which I shall henceforth refer to as the collective library, that truly matters, since it is our mastery of this collective library that is at stake in all discussions about books. - Abbreviations - not mutually exclusive - Op. cit. work cited - Ibid. ibidem - UB book unknown to me - SB book I have skimmed Books/SB+, Books/SB++, Books/SB- Books/SB--🤮 - HB book I have heard about - FB book I have forgotten - ++ extremely positive opinion, + positive opinion, - negative opinion -- extremely negative opinion - Highlights