The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freigthed with truth and beauty.
Theodore Parker

Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.  They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erect in the sea of time.”  They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman

A man is known by the books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Mark Twain

I am reading “She stoops to conquer”. (Somewhere in the background “Moby Dick” is also waiting to be finished.) It has made me think of how some plays are so easy to read as fiction, while others are so hard. There seems to be a scale: at one end is material that can only be appreciated on stage, at the other end is material that cannot be dramatized.

I have also been working on an implementation for research. One of the stumbling blocks has been communication between different processes. There are two kinds. Synchronous communication is like a telephone call, where both parties have to be available for the communication to succeed. Asynchronous communication is like email, where the message can be send without the other party being available to read it immediately. In some sense, they are really the same. The important distinction is that nothing “significant” can happen between exchanges.

These concepts carry over to literature. Live theatre is essentially synchronous communication: like a telephone call, nothing happens if either the audience or the actors are missing. Books, novels, are asynchronous: like an email message, they are sent without the author ever knowing if the addressee will ever read it and without even expecting a direct response.

The strange thing about a book is that the author imagines the reader, and the reader imagines the author. And this act of mutual imagination goes further. The reader conjures up a fantasy world in his mind to fit the story. Everyone’s world is unique, differing in the small or perhaps large detailsfrom everyone else’s. The author himself/herself has performed this exercise, putting down what they saw in their mind’s eye. Some authors write detailed prose (e.g., Tolkien), others are quite high-level in their descriptions (e.g., Chesterton). I wonder if the most successful books are the ones that constrain the readers’ imagination a lot (creating a full and complete world) or barely enough? Probably neither; there is a whole another sense in which the “message” of a book comes across.

I am way behind on my reading. My modest purpose is to finish all the unread books on my shelf. My readling list is somewhat of a barometer of how busy I am. And I do like to take breaks after reading a lot. But then, returning after a month or two or three, there is all that excitement as I remember how much fun it is to read.  The joy of lying in bed with a book…  I think I’ll do a little reading now.