Bookcases
Someday, I hope to have a place with a bookcase like this:
However, I’d be fine if I had these cool suspended bookcases like this:
Or, much more reasonably and realistically, there’s this lovely, cozy little space:
The thing I love about books has nothing to do with nostalgia, but the fact that, when I have a book, I can’t do anything with it other than read. I have this computer here, and I can do any number of things — email, calendar, weather, Wikipedia, and on and on. And on. I should define the context switch — that’s what happens when you’re reading a book, get tripped up by a word, look it up in a dictionary, then return to your original book. The fact that you have to actually put down one book, pick up another, and look for a word focuses your attention and keeps you doing one task. For the entire duration of that physical action, the picking up and setting down, your brain is going dirigible… dirigible… d-i-r-i… have I seen that somewhere before? However, when you have a computer, you just twitch on the alt-tab keyboard shortcut, and suddenly you see your Twitter stream, rather than your thesis. While your computer is pulling up the entry for dirigible, you’re checking the weather forecast for tomorrow.
So, with this awesome, powerful machine, you can keep a bunch of balls up in the air. Your brain becomes accustomed to focusing on tiny bits for short bursts of time, rather than focusing on big chunks for long stretches of time. When I read a long article on a computer, I switch out of it more than I would like, distracting my mind with other (useless, pointless) things.
But when you pick up a book, you’ve just got the book. I find that my mind calms down, knowing there’s nothing else going on — it’s not like my friend posted the funniest picture I’ve ever seen, and I can see it by going 42 pages back from my current page. People are curious… they’ve GOT to see if someone posted that picture. What if, in the past 5 minutes, someone posted something even funnier? And you’re on the road to addiction. But, not so with your book. It’s just the book. This is incredibly calming to my brain. In fact, I remember things more when I read them in a book or magazine. By contrast, on the computer, I have to switch to another program and make notes, just so I remember what I’m supposed to remember.