Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
The complete review reviews a book that considers the reader’s place in a culture that publishes far more than anyone could hope to read in several lifetimes.
After reading one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand books in a lifetime, what have we read ? Nothing. To say "I only know that I’ve read nothing," after reading thousands of books, is not false modesty. It is strictly accurate, to the first decimal place of zero percent.
I think this is a subject worth exploring, as we are in a completely different league nowadays with regard to the number of books there are to read. As the complete review points out, the author contrasts the increase of writing with the decrease in reading:
Publishing is a standard part of establishing an academic or bureaucratic career. It is like writing the necessary reports or properly filling out the forms required to enter a competition. It has nothing to do with reading or writing. Reading is difficult, it takes time away from the pursuit of a career, and it doesn’t gain anyone points except in lists of works cited. Publishing is a means to an end. Reading is useless: it is a vice, pure pleasure.
Based on the review, this book sounds like a pretty good first look at this topic, but sure it’s only beginning to raise some of the questions at stake here.
Perhaps this is the inevitable conclusion.
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I often wonder whether there’s a point to writing more given the quantity of what’s already out there.
This book looks interesting; I’ve just ordered it from Amazon.
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Based on the review, this book sounds like a pretty good first look at this topic, but sure it’s only beginning to raise some of the questions at stake
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Based on the review, this book sounds like a pretty good first look at this topic, but sure it’s only beginning to raise some of the questions at stake
The books and the ideas look very interesting. Seems like it could probably be paired with Pierre Bayard’s recent book on the virtues of non-reading, “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” Bayard raises similar kinds of conundrums.
Still–based simply on the reviews–I wonder whether this is overplayed a bit. People have been complaining that too much is being written to actually read for centuries if you look back. In some sense, we might say the sense of impossibility, of always beginning at the beginning, is a constitutive feature of reading as such. At least, certainly, since Gutenberg, but perhaps before.