On Reading

Reading is [mostly] fun. I like to read. I've liked reading before I liked writing, and even before I started on my music journey on the 笛子. I've read when I was hungry for new-fangled scientific facts; I've read when I was hungry for a bit of someone else's life explored and unfolded before my eyes. I've read when I was sad; I've read when I was happy. I've read when there was nothing to do; I've read when I needed to get some things done fast. I've read in the day; I've read in the night. I've read when the books were the yellowing pulp paper; I've read when the books are in glossy magazine paper [that weighs a ton]. I've read when I could get hold of my first e-ink reader, my first tablet, and my first vertically mounted monitor. In short, I like reading.

Did I mention that I like reading? I kinda forgot if I did so.

There are many reasons to read---read my first paragraph for some of the obvious ones. But there are more philosophical reasons as well. The thing is, for almost all of us, this mortal life is all we are going to get. Yes, there's life after death for the believers, but that life is different and is at best alluded to allegorically in scripture, and for the most part the metaphors put forth indicate that the after-life is not at all similar to the mortal one. Parenthesis aside, we all ``get'' this ``one'' mortal life. There is only a fixed amount of time per person, and that's all we are going to get, even with the best life-prolonging technology we have [so far]. This limits us to what we can actually viscerally experience on our own.

Now, humanity did not become the dominant life form of earth just relying on the individual visceral experience---this is no different from all other life forms, and look at where they are: they do not have the same planetary-scale modification powers the way we do. No. Humanity accelerates their mastery of the world through ``cheating''---we propagate information (and thus knowledge) at a much higher rate than any other life form that we know. An owl in a county may learn that certain obstacles may be traversed in a certain way, and it can only teach its children about it, while Dr Scientist who discovered a new fundamental law of nature can immediately disseminate that discovery to the thousands of other scientists (present and future) who are eager to learn about it through a published letter or paper.

Information communication technology (ICT) is useless if all we are good at is the transmission of information; an equally important part of ICT is the ability to read (and understand) the bloody thing. And this trick over the rest of our animal kingdom compatriots is what allows a single puny mortal human to accumulate the knowledge and wisdom of thousands of lives past, present, and future [speculative] with only one life time.

Reading is critically important from a personal development perspective too. Recall that I mentioned how reading allows one to accumulate the knowledge and wisdom of thousands of other lives? That's how we ought to learn, to avoid mistakes that had been made by generations past so that we make new mistakes while exploring the thought boundaries so that future generations can learn from us. But there is a catch though---reading about an experience should be considered as a guide of what someone had tried and what happened to them, and is not exactly the same as experiencing it for oneself. This does not contradict the usefulness though, since knowing about a possible outcome from a particular choice of action can be useful too, assuming that one has also developed the capability to think critically about what one has read.

But back to my liking of reading. I like reading; I wonder if I had mentioned that before. Someone once said that reading was like a temporary coma induced by staring at abstract symbols upon a dead tree, and in a completely mechanistic observation sort of way, they are right. But I don't see that as a negative---in fact, it is probably a good thing, since it reduces the amount of physical space that a person might need, since that same person, when reading, can just literally sit in one [small] cosy spot for a period of time. Compare that activity against the mountaineer who needs to climb a mountain to feel happy, or a runner who gets sick of the stupid indoor treadmill.

In short, reading is the perfect pandemic activity to partake in, and guess what, we are in the middle of a bloody pandemic now. And so, I have been reading as much as I can. Unfortunately though, the books that I have been getting involved in are starting to get longer and longer, especially for the really technical texts---these buggers have started to number around the kilo-pages order of magnitude. So it is easy to get tired of them.

I mean, reading technical texts now is so different from reading technical texts when I was just eleven. Back then, even the puny O-level physics text was considered sufficiently technical for reading. Now, I can't even read the O-level physics text with a straight-face---not because I'm smarter, but because the concepts have lost their novelty and have largely been internalised already. So to get the same ``high'' from reading, I end up pursuing either the basic texts for college-level disciplines that I'm not a specialist in (hello Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition)!), or advanced texts for disciplines that I have a vested interest in.

And these texts are long.

It's the same for fiction too. Enid Blyton was a loved author back when I was still in primary school, as was the Hardy Boys series. But nowadays, the fiction seems to need to get longer for the right kick? Actually, I'm not so certain about that last point I made: just viewing the latest read items (items 799--718) of my read-list has revealed that I've not really being dealing with much fiction. I mean, I am actively working through the Animorphs series (total estimated pages: 3.6k+), but that's only one fiction series weighed against the plurality of non-fiction works.

🤷‍♂️

It doesn't matter too much though. The key point is that I am still reading. I think that I will never stop reading as long as I am able to.

And I recommend that anyone who happens upon this blog post to consider picking up reading as a low physical impact but high mental impact past time. It can literally make one more aware of what the world is like without necessarily having to leave one's door step.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.