Weeding

=> Books for someone else to read

Over the last few months I've found myself doing a bit of 'weeding'. In libraries this is the name we give to removing items from a collection - sometimes justified with naff backronyms like MUSTIE. Indeed, my personal bookshelf is one of the places I've weeded. I'm interpreting it as a sign of improved mental health that I've done this. My TBR shelf is a window into what I thought I wanted to or should read in the past. I felt the urge to weed not just the books I have read, but more specifically the books I have not read. Umberto Eco claimed that his "anti-library" — the books he had not yet read — were more valuable than those he had read, because of their potentiality. I often find comfort in this when looking at a large pile of unread articles and books. But there are only so many hours in a lifetime, so we must be careful how we spend them. I've got no time for these books now. Looking at my TBR shelf was, at some point a couple of months ago, a jolting experience. I suddenly realised how different my thinking is now, compared to when I bought many of these books. And that makes sense — what I want to read now is a reflection of what I have read and listened to and experienced. I started desperately thinking I needed to read a bunch of Penguin Classics about the philosophy and politics of a bunch of long-dead white men when I was at the very beginning of a new phase in my life — I just didn't realise I was there. And when I say "new", I'm not even sure about that. In many ways it feels like my life has been a bit cyclical: there's probably more of my 16 year old self in my thinking about what life is all about now than there was a decade ago.

I mean this in several senses. Aged 16 I read the Hobart Mercury most but not all days, but being a regional daily newspaper, there wasn't a great deal in it. I read a lot, but it was overwhelmingly books or magazines of one sort or the other. I didn't wake up, roll over and fill my brain with the latest feelpinions and horrors from across the globe every morning.

What these books and these news articles have in common is ...well, a lot. I don't actually need to read most of these "classics" in order to know what they say — or more relevantly, how they have been interpreted. My society is saturated in them.

So recently I decided to attempt a little more balance. I'm trying to read one academic journal article each workday morning, instead of reading "news". This has the effect of carving out some space to do something I want to do anyway, and replacing an unhealthy habit with a new habit that is similar in some aspects. But I've also come to the view that this kind of habit is likely to help me understand more about what is really going on in the world, rather than being less aware. Journalists — especially political journalists — generally don't provide much real understanding. They cut corners, they "cover" the "stories" that powerful people want them to. Usually they don't really understand much about what they're writing about, or they want to believe there is more substance there than actually exists. So reading a book or two on history or psychology, or anthropology, or anarchist theory — and then checking the latest events once a month — seems much more likely to aid an understanding of what's really going on.

So weeding my bookshelf and "weeding" my news consumption go hand in hand. I can't say I've been wholely succesful yet — habits can be hard to break. But I'm hopeful I can develop some new, better, habits here, that are better for my mental health, help me act in more effective ways in our shared world, and provide better guidance on how to live. Sometimes we need to slow down in order to move forward.