More on reading

I frequently find myself reading more than one book at a time. Now is one of those times.

Usually, the books I have open are contrasting themes, styles, genres. I’ll have a crime novel going on the bus while a biography occupies my night stand. I’ve always carried a couple books on business travel because I never know which one I’ll be in the mood to read.

Using an electronic reader greatly facilitates this habit.  A few days ago I started This Explains Everything, a book of essays collected by a guy named John Brockman. I’d never heard of the gentleman, which is apparently evidence prima facie that I am not a deep thinker. You see, Mr. Brockman is a “cultural impresario,” if the bio on edge.org is to be believed. And we shouldn’t fail to believe it simply because it’s basically his own website that says so, right?

Edge.org according to its own description is an “online science salon.” True to this somewhat hyperbolic description, you have to be willing to wade through a fair amount of self-satisfaction on the part of many of the folks whose essays appear there. After all, these are “the most complex and sophisticated minds” to be found. Just ask ‘em.

The Edge chooses one question each year and then seeks out the people John Brockman considers to be his intellectual peers and asks each of them to provide an answer in a short essay. For the year covered by the book at hand, the question was, “What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?” Since Brockman himself is so clearly full of, well, himself I fully expected the folks he brought together to be similarly filled up.

So I approached  This Explains Everything with tongue in cheek. But reading  the first essay - Evolution By Means of Natural Selection by Susan Blackmore - I found myself caught up in the clarity of her thought. I read it in the first ten minutes of the bus ride and then spent the remaining thirty minutes staring at my feet, thinking about what I’d just read.

On the way home that day, I read Life Is a Digital Code by Matt Ridley. And again, I had to pause to think for awhile. By the time I’d read The Power of Absurdity by Scott Atran, two things had become clear. First, while John Brockman may be a prig, he’s done a good job of pulling together some really interesting correspondents. Second, this is not a book I’m going to skip through in a few days.

So I opened the next book on my list, Sh*t My Dad Says by Juston Halpern. I thought from the liner notes it would be a comic waltz through the author’s reminiscences of his father. Which in fact, it is. Some of the things that came out of Halpern pere’s mouth are outrageously funny. Outrageous. And funny.

Many of them are also profound.  Halpern Sr. is frequently profane, sometimes unreasonable and always pretty sure he knows what’s right. And he’s in many ways the kind of Dad I hope I’ve been but I’m not at all sure I’ve measured up.

So, I have these two scripts running through my head. On the one hand, the essays of some really stellar thinkers who have been invited on the basis of extensive and impressive academic credentials to offer their thoughts on an interesting question. On the other hand, the extemporaneous comments of a regular guy whose son found him both amusing and profound enough to share with an audience, including moi.

I’ve never thought that the ‘great thinkers’ of any age were necessarily brilliant. In fact, before the age of generally available and publicly funded education, many of the ‘thinkers’ were chosen not on the basis of innate intelligence but rather as an accidental function of birth into a family that could afford time to read and discuss and ponder the great questions. (Sure, Plato was brilliant but was there an even smarter guy in his household who never read a scroll because he was born a slave? Could be, right?)

In our day, education and information is shared with a wide cross-section of people, so that a much broader sampling of our population has the opportunity to learn and think and have their thoughts found and considered by others. The world according to Mr. Halpern is right there in my Nook, right alongside those essays by ‘great thinkers.’

I’m learning from both books, neither more nor less from one than the other.

I love this century!