Booking through Thursday is particularly thought-provoking this week! I almost forgot to check the topic…
This week’s question: I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:
“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”
To what extent does this describe you?
I love this quote!! My first connection was a remembrance from college… My former roommate once said that she knew how stressed out I was by the volume of pages I consumed. The implication was as my need for escape increased, my need to read did as well.
I think the reverse may be true now — when I need to figure out a problem, I have a hard time focusing on what I’m reading — now I tend to need to brainstorm possible solutions before I can jump into a work.
So, while the extent of my reading may have indicated an insufficiency in my past, I now find that I choose works that orient toward my future. Which would explain why I rarely read nonfiction when I was younger and seem to have an insatiable appetite for it now. Currently I am loving Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma — and I’m a herbivore! 
The older I get, the more I want to learn about lives – and information — beyond my own experience.
What about all of you? Any reaction to the quote? Could you use reading as a litmus test for your life?
