One of the assigned texts for History of Writing Technologies is Gabriel Zaid’s So many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. It’s not on the syllabus until later in the semester, but I started flipping around in it today. So far, I’m rather enchanted.

Those who aspire to the status of cultured individuals visit bookstores with trepidation, overwhelmed by the immensity of all they have not read. They buy something that they’ve been told is good, make an unsuccessful attempt to read it, and when they have accumulated half a dozen unread books, feel so bad that they are afraid to buy more.

In contrast, the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.

“Every private library is a reading plan,” Spanish philosopher José Gaos once wrote. So accurate is this observation that in order for it also to be ironic the reader must acknowledge a kind of general unspoken assumption: a book not read is a project uncompleted. ... (12)

... maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us.

What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive (24).