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Reading Woe
December 29th, 2008 at 00:55
I like to think of myself intellectually as a sort of ancient-greek scholarly type – learned and wise and interested in all facets of knowledge. What this basically means is that I think I know a little about a lot, am easily distracted from what I should be studying and spend my days lying around in my pyjamas pontificating on the internet.
The ancients had it easy, really. Sure, they didn’t have modern conveniences like BBC Four and Wikipedia, but they could get away with knowing pretty much fuck all and still call themselves educated, because the collective body of human thought was much smaller than it is now.
These days though, we have much more knowledge than any one man can handle – there’s some sort of statistic that says something like there being more books published now every year than the number of books published ever before something like 1900 (though the value of modern books isn’t considered – it’s fairly probably that Thomas Paine’s Booky-wook is more important than Russell Brand’s). This statistic in itself is another piece of knowledge – and evidently something else that I don’t actually know.
What’s got me started on this is that I’ve stumbled upon the conclusion that there’s simply too much information for me to consume and I can’t cope with it. And I don’t like this feeling at all, because it gives me a massive sense of intellectual jealousy and hatred towards people who are better than me. Though I’m very much a fan of the pursuit of knowledge, nothing annoys me more than smart kids – the sort who took their exams a year early and later turn up as contestants on University Challenge. Watching University Challenge, before the private-school educated, received-pronunciation using, prefect-used-to-being wanker has even explained what they’re reading at Oxbridge, I will irrationally hate them. How can anyone retain such huge quantities of knowledge and consume it at such an unbelievable rate?
Angry tangents aside though, the point I intended to make in the first paragraph is that I simply don’t know how to go about consuming all of the media I’d like to – I’m not sure whether or not it’s a time management issue or a trying to learn too much stuff issue, but in an ideal world, I’d like to read simultaneously:
- All unread items in Google Reader
- The Economist every week
- The Guardian at least a few times a week
- A non-fiction book
- Some sort of great work of literature
- Oh, and all of that academic reading I should be doing
Unfortunately in the annoyingly tangible real world, in actual fact I tend to manage:
- Some of my Google Reader items
…and that’s about it. So I guess this post is something of a cry for help – albeit a mostly unimportant cry based on a fabricated dilemma. I’m pretty much complaining that kicking myself in the face is not only difficult for a non-Russian gymnast like myself, but it really hurts too.
C’mon readers, throw me a bone. Tell me how to manage my reading.
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