“What I didn’t understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn’t the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.”
– Paul Graham, Stuff
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“But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it. If that sounds sad, it isn’t. From an early age, the constant reader accepts a story as an artefact. Alive to the artificiality of texts, he finds it hard to understand the fundamentalist viewpoint, Christian or otherwise, which casts certain phrases as sacred. The constant reader is sceptical, irreverent and fickle. He doesn’t make a god of any text, because he knows it is provisional and there’ll be another one along in a minute.”
– Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self
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Books are the greatest stuff in the world.
Immediately useful.
Unlike most other stuff, there is always a need for more books.
When you realise the infinite number of books available then you know you cannot settle.
There is no one book, to be pored over, ad infinitum.
There is a constant stream of new words to digest.
Books are never wasted.
I buy books speculatively – not every one will be a winner.
But one useful sentence from a book makes the investment worthwhile.
You start to see not individual books, enclosures of space, but books as a natural wilderness, where everything is connected.
An ecology of words.
Conversations With Quotations 