I love to read, but I’d choose book browsing over reading any day. There’s so many titillating promises on book jackets. It wasn’t always this way. There are copywriters and design teams whose sole purpose is to get book browsers like myself to choose their book over all the others. I want this job. My fallback would be to be a movie-critic, but I don’t write all that well, so it’s probably not realistic.
Lately I’ve been gravitating towards the Science section. Just being near this section makes me feel smart. Books about Einstein and cosmology and quarks. Most of the book jackets claim that you don’t need a PhD to understand them. I keep eying this book called “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” It has all these rave reviews on the back how it’s going to blow my mind, but whenever I try reading a page I run into all sorts of formulas and big math words and I feel a little bit dumber.
Also, books that center around “loneliness” have been jumping out at me lately. One’s in the essay section - Jonathan Franzen’s “How to Be Alone: Essays.” The other one is in the Science section. I can’t remember the title, but it’s supposed to be about how we’re all social animals and yada yada yada. If there was a book called “How to Cure Loneliness,” I’d buy it in a second. I guess what I enjoy about book-browsing is the promise. All the great reviews, the thoughtful front covers, the author’s full resume…
I’ve been going to the bookstore every day now for the past week. I’ve been mixing up the locations so I don’t appear to have an addiction. At first I was looking for a magical well of blogging ideas. The best I could find were boring trivia books. Writing every day for this blog is tough. If I ever imply that it’s easy, then I’m probably lying. I still look for blogging how-to books in the Computer section, but I’ve gotten better. I quickly move to another section, because blogging about blogging does nobody any good.
I spend most of my time wandering aimlessly, telling the friendly staff that I’m just looking. What I’m looking for, I’m not quite sure. I was close to buying this book called “The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors,” but it was 17 dollars (2 dollars over my per-book limit). I think the title sort of speaks for itself, so I won’t elaborate. Non-fiction, the societal implications of social media (and yes, blogging).
I started my search several days ago hoping to find that well of ideas. If there was a book called “1000 Ideas for a Blog Post” I would certainly have bought it days ago, albeit with some embarrassment, but instead I found something even better – the Art section. I’d been looking in all the obvious places like the Writing section. There’s all sorts of writing books that claim to contain the cure for writer’s block, but most are crap. Writing is creative, art is creative. Why hadn’t I thought to look in art?
One of the ideas that used to be big at my office was the notion of “business topography.” In a nutshell, it’s the idea that you can often find ways to improve your business by stealing ideas from unrelated industries. For example, did you know that the assembly line process made famous by the Ford Motor Company was partly inspired by processes already employed in the Chicago meat-packing industry? (I’m 80% sure I got that factoid right. Use it at your own risk.)
While I didn’t find the idea generating book I’d originally envisioned, I found this whole ‘nother related section right under my nose. Restated: What I really wanted was the 50-year anthology of Playboy centerfolds (Art?), but then I remembered I was in a bookstore and not a porn shop. The next best thing was this short book on art in the everyday, “The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa” I’d almost recommend this book to you without my having read it, but I won’t. It’s taken me 7 days to find this one book, so it must be good, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment