An Ordinary Reader

(written in 2017)

A question I frequently ask myself is: why am I reading all this stuff?

I started cataloguing all the books I own the other day. This sort of tidying and organizing activity wells up from within me at moments of restlessness or anxiety. It’s the kind of task that is not exactly a waste of time and gives me a sense of slowly accumulated, incremental achievement. I have moved internationally a couple of times in my adult life so the books that have made it to my current shelves have had to survive at least one mass extinction event— there is some reason I still own them, presumably.

A book I finished reading quite recently is The Cosmopolitan Tradition by Martha C. Nussbaum. I picked it up in a book shop I was killing time in, waiting for a meeting nearby, and the short extract on the dust jacket impelled me to buy it. I read it over a couple of weeks, underlining and writing margin notes in the way I do for books I consider somehow important. After I finished it I took notes based on those pencil markings and then wrote up some brief thoughts.

It’s a good book: I enjoyed reading it and learned something. It’s what I would describe in my own taxonomy as academic. I don’t mean, by that term, that it’s dry. I mean that it’s not written to be an entertaining, popular read. You would never confuse it with Beanies and Bowlers: How the Hat Industry Makes You Angrier, and What You Can Do About It. By academic I also mean that when I try to describe to someone else what it’s about or what I learned I will invariably fail. Looking through the partial catalogue I have made of my books so far I have become more aware of how many fall into this category of academic. Here is a selection: Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott; Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman (actually most of Hirschman’s major works); Economics and Utopia by Geoffrey Hodgson; Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern by John Gray (lots of other John Gray books, read over a decade ago); The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James; Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Majorie Kelly; Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson; The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper (both volumes); The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. The are plenty of others like these. These are the books, poured and scribbled over, that I wonder about: what am I reading them for? I have always read a lot and my question is not why I read books in general. The other broad categories in my taxonomy are popular non-fiction (including history and biography) and fiction, and I go to those books primarily for pleasure: the pleasure of a good story, of learning something new, of surprise, of shared sorrow, even of outrage. The academic books are not pleasurable in the same way, though (well, maybe Hirschman).

I suppose my given name for them as a group, academic, should tell me something. I have a degree in Chemistry and when I left university I felt that I didn’t have a very rounded education. History seemed a particular blank spot. So I went to a book shop round the corner from my first real job and bought The Penguin History of the World by J.M. Roberts. It was not academic (too enjoyable) but I did not buy it with pleasure in mind. Initially, then, my aim was to better educate myself, but even then I didn’t know to what end.

Reading any book has an opportunity cost: all the other books you could have read but didn’t. The Penguin History of the World is a pretty big book. As a young person starting out his career should I have read four or five books about business or biographies of the successful instead? I learned in the Nussbaum book mentioned above about Cicero’s De Officiis and “just how central [it] was to the education of both philosophers and statesmen for many centuries”. I am currently reading a biography of Clement Attlee, who read William Morris and others en route to becoming Britain’s greatest socialist prime minister. I am a software engineering manager in his early 40s and the only categories of books I really can’t bear to read are about software engineering and management. So I am clearly not reading for professional advantage.

I often have the experience, while reading and underlining, of identifying some insight. But shortly after I close the book, or even just turn the page, the insight recedes into a heavy fog with its outlines barely visible. When I was eighteen I moved to London to attend university. My understanding of the city began as separate islands centered around tube stations. Those islands would, as I explored, gradually expand until they started to join up to form larger islands. I still remember how exiting it was to discover how the Leicester Square and Covent Garden islands fit together above ground. My personal philosophy of the world works like this, with each book as a new street on the island of Politics, or Economics, or Human Flourishing. The difference is that when I return to the stations the mental map I have been making of my own beliefs begins immediately to fade. I could still, over fifteen years later, find my way from Hackney Central, via London Fields, to Brick Lane, but I couldn’t tell you how and why Rebecca Solnit connects to Nicholas Christakis, even though I feel like they do.

I am person of average abilities, but I do have a strong desire to understand my own picture of the world and my own conscience. I know I can’t simply adopt a monolithic system of thought, religious or otherwise, but I am also incapable of any profound original thoughts. I think that my reading over all these years has been an effort to find the writers who express, far more clearly than I ever could, what I believe.

I need to write down, however imperfectly, how it all fits together, and especially where it doesn’t. I’m not sure why it matters to me, but judging by my own behavior in the last twenty or so years I must admit that it does.