Friday, June 2, 2017

Friday Book Report: Half a book


So today’s book report is, in theory, about Walker Percy’s book The Message in the Bottle.  It’s a collection of essays with the subtitle “How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other.”  I read a little more than half of it.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in language, cognition, and philosophy.  It’s not that I find semiotics boring.  I can be fascinated by all of those things.  This particular version of the discussion just isn’t capturing my attention.  Some of it has to do with the age of the essays.  The voice is very White and very Male.  I forget that I used to swim in that water without noticing it (hmm… a reflection about language in a book about language…).  The kind of alienation Percy speaks about in his man on the subway is not the Zeitgeist of this era; we have our own brand of alienation and apparently flavors of despair look more dated than the glasses our fathers wore for twenty years.

I should have stopped reading after the first forty pages or so.  Maybe even earlier.  I stuck it out for 176 out of a mistaken sense of duty.  Some books are not my books.  Some teachers are not my teachers.  I can remain engaged in how language works, what makes humans conscious, how brains work, where the path of evolution takes us, and other mind/body issues without reading this particular book.  I choose to spend my time with some other book.


Some of fitness is about making good choices.  Choose a book you love.

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