Today's daily article from the Mises Institute is called "
Change Your Mind" and is about the future job market requiring more creative (a.k.a. right-brained) thinking. There was an interesting blurb about Henry Hazlitt's thoughts on reading that I thought might be of interest to those in this community. It's not e-book specific but since it concerns the reading of "useless books," it might be perceived as more important advice in the age of electronic reading when frivolous, unchallenging reading is more ubiquitous than pennies on the ground.
Quote:
In Thinking as a Science, Henry Hazlitt makes the point that we tend to imitate the authors we read, and so it is important to only read the best books. Our thinking is formed by our reading and it's not enough to only occasionally read serious work while mostly reading useless books, magazines, and newspapers. People don't think the shallow reading harms them, but it does. "This is just as if they were to buy and eat unnutritious and indigestible food," Hazlitt explains, "and excuse themselves on the ground that they ate nourishing and digestible food along with it."
"One good meal will not offset a week of bad ones; one good book will never offset any number of poor books." For one to stay competitive, a person can't be satisfied that they have already read the required substantial books and can now relax and only ingest junk.
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With all the (quite appropriate) bashing of the likes of Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer that goes on in any literature community (to say nothing of my own biases and lit-snobbery), I thought this was a good defense of quality reading. Of course, at some point the line between quality and "useless" must blur so the question of what constitutes a "good book" must inevitably come up.
Thoughts?