Are Books Overrated?
Rick Gekoski of the Guardian asks is reading overrated? I’ll let the piece speak for itself with only a modicum of commentary here, but he makes a few reasonable points, most of which can be chalked up to the simple hyperbole of the quotee (one being quoted).
Reading may not be “everything” but there’s something to be said for the simple act of reading words in a book opposed to thousands of other ‘trivial’ acts one performs in a day. On a cognitive level, I suspect that books can be set apart from almost all other human artifacts based on their sheer ‘representational density’. To unpack, a book qua physical object is rather small and unobtrusive (physically) but during the (cognitive) act of reading it becomes representationally quasi-infinite (or as large of a thing as the human brain can deal with). Baseball, chess, horticulture, tv shows, etc. while rich and complex in their own right, are literally bounded in one or several ways. Books seem (even if it’s just a cognitive trick) boundless.
