Eric's Beijing Diary

Dining car again. Kunming—Shanghai Express. Just finished a bowl of noodles, and I'm reading the weirdest book I've ever read. It's called, "if nobody speaks of remarkable things," by jon mcgregor. Couple backpackers at the youth hostel in Chengdu gave it to me. I'm on page 105, and I still have absolutely no idea what this book is about. It's a novel of some kind. I know that, because it says on the cover. It's set in England. Beyond that, I haven't got a clue. If this book doesn't start making sense pretty soon, I may have to quit reading it.

It's not the first time this has happened to me. I read half-way through Imanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and didn't understand a single sentence of a single paragraph. The pages of my life are littered with the books I have started by have not finished. I suppose that's partly due to the old addage that "you can't tell a book by its cover." Sometimes you just have to start reading to find out if the book in question is really going to have the value added that it appears to. But there is another reason. The books I read generally fit into two categories. There are books I read because I believe that the information they contain will be of value to me, and there are others that are just very interesting. For the most part, the second category is a subset of the first, but it's a very small subset. Most of the books I read just are not that fascinating. They requre some measure of effort and concentration. Fortunately, I really do like to read, and I suppose this makes it easier to endure books that are a little boring in places. But the simple fact is that most of the books I read are books that I have entered into because of my thirst for knowledge and understanding. I would be a very different person if I only read books that held my interest easily.

Labels: Summer 2004