January 26, 2025

Reading, physical space, and desire

I think it comes in cycles, my desire to read. I have variously picked up and put back down the tablet and ereader, but the versatility - of switching between The Para-Academic’s Handbook to Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World and Eyes of the Void - just makes it too appealing for the eclectic and sporadic reader that I am. The hitch, and it is deeply felt, is that physical books have more of a presence in my mind, and offer far more opportunities to engage with the put-down text, the half or quarter finished book that lost my attention. And many of these books are perfectly worth finishing - such as Inventing Our Selves or Why I Am Not a Buddhist, which really shouldn’t haven taken me so long to read - but they simply lose out in the dripping, saturated informational environments of work, leisure and media, and personal research projects.

Personal research projects is an important aside here, and the endless flow of PDFs and their highlights with my notes mixed in. I’ve constructed a fairly elaborate pipeline of gathering, reading, annotating, exporting, and reflecting on the journal articles I consume (though with no small difficulty, as I am no longer a university student with access to research databases). These documents, however, feel much more transient, as there are fewer ideas to capture, and the articles are usually so directed at a single research idea or topic that they become scaffolded in other mental infrastructures. Books, however, so often stand on their own - pulling together ideas toward a story or structure and becoming more independent than its parts - that they require a different approach toward absorption, with perhaps the pinnicale of this endeavor manifested in the reader’s self-transformation. Personally, reaching for books that take me to this height is my purpose of reading, with texts such as Atomic Habits and Seeing That Frees providing me with tools, ideas, and, yes, experiences of reading that are truly transformative.

Wallpaper for my Onyx Boox Nova 3

But back to my ereader: Where do those digital books go, if not into a barely-perceptible ether of bits that’s stashed in some subfolder of my Documents directory? Seeing the titles on the shelves is part of its living presence in my life, in my mind, and that passive exposure is part of the desirous process that makes book collecting so rewarding. Passing by the shelf, seeing Introducing Contemplative Studies and Philosophy as a Way of Life, feeling the urge to pick it up and then remembering that I am half-started on four nonfiction and two fiction texts - it may be inefficient, it may be playing toward an undisciplined part of my mind - but it is the way I stay engaged in reading, no matter how incomplete and imperfect the process.

And then there are simply times - weeks and months, years during graduate school - where leisure reading evaporates. And these are guilty times, though they probably shouldn’t be, times where I still see those books and feel perhaps a twinge of my shedded-Christian guilt aimed at my falling short of the cardinal value of lifelong learning. Lately, though (and its almost assuredly because I am no longer a graduate student), I don’t feel that guilt anymore. Well, if the replacement is social media, the guilt is more of a questioning, the, “Are you truly satisfied with replacing this time with shorts and reels, rather than books or games?”

It is not recommended to use your wife’s glasses to read.

A bit of a digression, yet back to the point: Physical books have a place in my mind because that have a place in my spaces, and call me back home. I haven’t found how to organize my digital spaces to be that conducive for evoking the desire to read, to be with ideas I find important and impactful and entertaining.

Knowledge Pictures


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