Books Begetting Books
The 8 Influences That Gave Birth to “Wanting”
The Reflexivity of Books
Winston Churchill famously said that “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The remark came during a debate about how to rebuild the Commons Chamber, which had been bombed during a blitz. He advocated keeping an adversarial rectangular structure in place because he believed that two-party debate was essential to British parliamentary democracy — and that the shape of the old chamber had been directly responsible for the form of the debate.
Could we not say the same thing about books? The form of a book shapes the way that I engage with it. When I have a hard copy, I draw, annotate, underline, and doodle (I brutalize my books.) On my Kindle, I jump around, search for names or words, screenshot things and share on Twitter. Totally different experience.
I wonder about the future of book engagement in a Web-3 world when books will soon be tokenized, further-digitized, and accessible in bits and pieces (which readers may have to “unlock” with various currencies) on platforms like mirror.xyz. How might this change the way that books shape us?
There’s a metaphysical question to all of this, too. I’m haunted to this day by a conversation I had with a friend of mine who is…
