Books!
My problem with books is that 95% are crap. Even if you have access to a large library it can still take a lot of precious time to find something that connects. A bit like searching for new music. There is good stuff out there but you do have to wade through a lot of derivative dross. Even worse for movies. I guess almost everyone is chasing the dollar and following the formula. Thankfully not everyone though. |
All 3 are very difficult subjects to write about. To this day I haven’t seen a better book on psychology than Eric Berne’s A Layman’s Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. It’s the only one I remember out of the dozens I have read. I’ve yet to read a really good book on either Freud or Jung. What about hypnosis? Is there even a single decent book written about it? Henry Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science is certainly a book I wish I’d read much earlier in life. As is Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly (which was impossible as it was only published in 2013). Both books are a distillation of an enormous amount of experience and knowledge gathered in an easy to read volume.
I’ve read dozens of books on the Beatles but Mark Lewisohn’s renders most of them redundant. Best book on Lennon? How about Albert Goldman’s The Many Lives of John Lennon? I’ve yet to read his book on Elvis but I’m hoping it will be more memorable than Peter Guralnick’s efforts. Heinrich Harrer’s 1959/64 book ’The White Spider’ remains my favourite book on mountaineering. When it comes to books on personal computers apart from Carey Holzman’s The Healthy PC (now sadly out of both print and date) I found nothing memorable.
What about novels? How many can you call truly great? Anna Karenina, A Christmas Carol, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, 1984, Tropic of Capricorn, Remembrance of Things Past, Young Man in the Sun, Tom Sawyer, The Rose (Charles L Harness), Wuthering Heights are the ones that immediately come to mind though I must have read hundreds. The vast majority of which I now have little recollection.
Life is too short and time is too precious to waste on books. Just like with audio playback, you want the very best that’s out there. It’s also very important to be able to put what you read into some form of practical use. There’s nothing wrong with reading for entertainment or escapism, and I should know, but just how many decent reads are out there when you have mostly mountains of dross being churned out on a daily basis. There’s also mountains of books being pulped and deleted forever everyday but sadly not all of them are dross either. We all might have different tastes, but what you read can really matter and make a difference.
Here’s a writer I’ve never read (along with Dostoevsky), but I’ve always liked this quote. "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." E.M. Forster, Howards End
Here’s another by our good friend @mahgister "If you are about to die, because life is short, almost all books are not so much important... Save very few one...."
Indeed. |
My favourites include: Sound Bites: 50 years of Hi-Fi News by Ken Kessler Ken’s travelogue never fails to captivate each time I return to it. A Pair of Wharfedales: The Story of Gilbert Briggs and His Loudspeakers by David Briggs A great historical read. Plenty of good photographs and an even handed tone. G.A.B. himself would have been pleased. Sound Reproduction by Gilbert Briggs An almost ancient tome in 2021 but rarely, if ever, have the fundamentals of audio been written with such clarity. Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole. This one’s more educational, and I’ve only read the 2nd edition, but there’s a lifetime of knowledge in these pages. |
A couple of people I know recommended Bill Bryson to me. So out of respect I picked up his A Short History of Almost Everything and The Body.
They’re interesting enough, but so far nothing new. Apart from this following passage which has left me puzzled.
Extract from The Brain, chapter 4 of The Body p56.
"In a similar way, the brain manufactures all the components that make up our senses. It is a strange and non-intuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no colour, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odour.
As British doctor and author James Le Fanu has put it, ’whilst we have the overwhelming impression that the greennes of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space.’ All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is, but what your brain tells you it is, and that’s not the same thing at all." ------
Even if everything is all interpretation, surely sound waves cannot be silent? Or can they?
Can someone please help me out here? |
