BOOKS!

I love books. The browsing and buying, the cover art and having a library of my own. That being said; I’m a slow reader. This means I have at least two dozen books that are waiting to be read in my bookshelf. And that’s not so good. Books in general have been in the verge of change to an electronic version for years now, but still the physical book sales are doing all right. In addition to that, in places like Finland, libraries are still very popular.

Books have a lot going for them: owning a book makes you look smart and so does reading them – especially in public. Books can be purchased quite cheaply and sometimes older books are even given away for free to make room for more new books. So, the supply is there. The situation is even better with electronic books, as classics can be purchased for pennies and sometimes you can find good electronic (or e-books) from libraries nowadays.

Books don’t automatically make you smarter. It is an illusion, like it was stated before.  A reader can read the most publicly acclaimed books in the world day in and day out, but never understand the deeper meanings and the levels of the story, nor the nuances that the reader should learn from the actions of the characters. Sometimes even the places have a deeper meaning: the character in a book is placed in an old, damp, jail cell – does it mean that the writer is saying the characters mood is dark?

I don’t have the skills to understand the subplots or the more in depth layers of books. It’s not for the lack of trying, but it is just very difficult to see what makes the Raskolnikov\’s character so complicated that people seem to see all sorts of connections to universal truths. I do appreciate the Dostoyevsky\’s talent with words and the complexity of the language is enough for me to be intrigued about a book like “Crime and Punishment”.

The books about facts, like biographicals, textbooks and for example, self help guides, are also interesting to me. The fact (pun intended) of learning new things is a virtue. If you lose your interest in the world and learning, you stop to evolve. Now I know that books aren’t the only way to keep learning, but they are a very affordable way to travel to a different world from the comfort of your armchair.