Pound for pound, a book is the best return for your money. Forget Wall Street and the investment portfolio; let’s go for walls lined with books. The investment will be in experience and knowledge and not in the wallet of course, but the love of money is the root of all evil and the love of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
The poet Donald Hall wrote, “Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair.” This is not quite right, but close enough. Here are several reasons why we should be buying and reading books, and they are good ones.
1. Reading is doing. Pascual-Leone, a neuroscientist, once sat down two groups of experienced piano-players in front of their instrument. One group was asked to play a short series of notes, while the other was asked to simply sit and think about playing the series of notes. The scientists found whether they were playing the piano, or thinking about playing the piano, the neural activity was the same.
What if brain activity was identical whether you were in Yellowknife or Yakima or thinking you were there? Neurologically, the difference between reading about something and doing it is negligible. And, if actually doing it serves no practical purpose, experience in the mind is enough.
2. Books can keep you young. Children have fantastic minds. Most of the questions that occupy philosophers for life are really only children’s questions: What are people for? Why is a duck? Where is God?
The trouble is that this roving curiosity about the world can deteriorate into a kind of insipid voyeurism that has gotten us Reality TV and gossip.
Books, especially fiction and creative nonfiction, can keep you thinking about the world with a healthy curiosity that lifts yours eyes off the irrelevancy and rests it on bigger things, enriching the life of the mind, keeping that wonder of childhood alive. Sigurd Olson, conservationist and nature writer, said, “If you lose the power of wonder, you grow old, no matter how old you are. If you have the power of wonder, you are forever young—the whole world is pristine and new and exciting.”
3. Books can be your teachers. Take a professor, scientist, a careerist of any sort who dedicates their life to a certain discipline. Inevitably, they will write a book. Here is a lifetime of aggregate discovery and wisdom compacted into something you can hold in your hand. They have done the hard work for us, and we have the privilege of standing on their shoulders. How can we not buy these books?
Knowledge is power, the old saying goes. If books contain knowledge, then isn’t power cheap?
4. Books make the inactive portions of your life productive. Keep a book within reach, and your life can be productive even in the smallest of times. I will prop a book on the dresser while I put on my pants, and this is redeeming the time. In this way, even leisure has a kind of urgency in it, and those afternoons in the armchair, while pleasurable, will change your life.
5. You can support an author. Annie Dillard once told a friend, “I would rather do anything than be a writer.” This confused the friend and he replied, “That sounds just like a person who works in a factory and hates it.”
What the friend didn’t realize is that while an author’s life is frustrating, a writer who thinks of not writing; well, that’s an impossible thought. It becomes how they process the world, and becomes an extension of their thinking process to the extent they are enslaved by it and refreshed by it, simultaneously a kind of determinism and willing slavery. It’s hard work, low pay, often thankless.
Pity them. Buy their books. You can trust me here, because I am not an author and have no ulterior motives.
6. You can support an independent bookstore. Buying books at big-chain booksellers like Books-a-Million, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon is like any other big chain-store purchase: You pay for the tycoon’s wine and withhold the soup from the little guy. Independent bookstores, on the other hand, deserve your patronization.
Amazon has used strong-arm tactics to corner the market, such as taking away the purchasing buttons on publishers like Macmillan’s, Melville House, and Hachette when they refused to bow to Amazon’s ridiculous price demands. Since Amazon has an immense bookselling base, they almost drove these traditional publishers away from the trough, though their portion was already comparably small. Jeff Bezos said once, “Amazon should approach independent booksellers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
Which explains why I feel like an activist every time I walk away from an independent bookshop with a receipt of sale.
7. Books are a way of fighting back against consumerism. A soil biologist by the name of Don Campbell said, “If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make big changes, change the way you see things.” Books can change the way we see things and in this way are the biggest movers and shakers of the world. There is nothing so revolutionary as a shift in perspective.
Infusing the why of our lives is a way to fight back against world that appeals to the sensual as a marketing tactic: They want you to eat, but not care about the food; they want you to buy, but not care where it comes from; they want you to work, but not have a job worth taking pride in. Books are a kind of throwback, a kind of rebellion to infuse an accurate consciousness to underpin our actions and give us knowledge how they affect the world. Such a rebellion? I’m for it.
8. Books are superior to almost every kind of media. Alan Jacobs, in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, makes the case for e-readers, saying they gave him the ability to read long-form works again. Other people use e-readers in the spirit of minimalism. This is honorable, and if it works for you, then please do so. I like the physical presence of a book too much to be seduced by a gadget.
I might have one or two tree’s worth of paper in my house, and you can be sure those trees did not die in vain. You can’t dog-ear the page in a kindle, or sign it over to a friend. Loaning and lending books makes for community, and e-readers neatly do away with that. Who wants to be dependent on an electrical outlet? And what about the pleasure of shopping in a bookstore? I appreciate the ability to jam a book into a backpack; to lose it, discover it, annotate it, fall asleep holding it. There is nothing that makes me feel simultaneously richer and more insignificant than a library. And, I enjoy being the holdover from the Pleistocene on the airplane.
9. Books, especially by trustworthy publishers, can be trusted. Books are labor intensive to produce. There are the reams of editing and rewriting that go into any traditionally published book, and there are the literary critics who keep the legitimacy of literature alive. Books, in short, are more reliable sources of information than cheaper media; the cost of producing them demands it and the critics maintain it. This is why, I think, books will never go obsolete. They fill a certain place in public discourse no other media has attained (yet) by the costs associated with them and a demographic of readers who demand and expect true and good information.
But books are expensive, I can hear you squawking already. Of course they are, and they should be. New books will cost you twenty dollars and up, but I have found an interesting thing happening when I buy a new book. When I spend so much money on it, I care about that book and will read it more slowly, careful to excavate all the concepts, making notes of the insights and quotes. Which is how a book should be read. I never speed-read a book I bought new.
Besides, they are cheap compared to shoes, steak dinners, I-gadgets, or other trivialities. Spend wisely. Withdraw the mutual funds, sell your vehicle, shop at the opportunity store, take out a loan, whatever it takes.
A fellow by the name of Erasmus said, “When I get a little money, I buy books. If I have any left, I buy clothes and food.” Erasmus must have been nearly a model citizen.