Okay, one last thought that I had about the FaceBook argument. That guy kept asking me what conservative media I read, and I knew full well that it was a set-up question. No matter how many sources I named, he would say he read more, and hence was an expert, and thus my opinion was uninformed and invalid. I knew better than to play that game, but it did make me think about at what point does a person cross the threshold and become “well read?”
There is the Malcom Gladwell rule/guideline of 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Does that apply to reading? Not reading up on a subject, because if you spent 10,000 reading about plumbing, you might not be an expert, but you would, or at least should, be very knowledgeable on the subject. But if you spent 10,000 hours reading, anything and everything, does that makes you an expert at reading?
I don’t know where I was going with that…
Being well read.
Anyway…
With all of the news interviews in people’s homes, the performance space in demand clearly has been a wall of books in an office setting. That is the “classic” sign of a well-read person. Some offices are a little too conspicuously clean and well organized, like the books are never touched. The offices I have enjoyed looking at are the ones where the books and papers are sort of stacked all over the place. Those are usually the offices of research doctors, and I want to believe that they just threw their books on the shelf when they are done reading it.
I can admit that, since moving back from California, I only have about half of my books in the apartment, with the other half still in storage. We have one wall in the apartment that all the housed books live on. They are in no order, and just got thrown up there. It’s not author ordered, or even in some sort style of size of book color. We just them up there with the plan of coming back and put some order to it. That was seven months ago.
