Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, Marx's Capital, Foucault's work, von Neumann and Morgenstern' Game Theory, and the Perl 6 Apocalypses and Exegeses from the early 2000's.
Feynman's lectures
The joy of reading books you don't understand
11–20 of 263 posts
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#12I feel like the idea of understanding media has, for many of us, become a prison. The purest version of understanding is kind of a personal relationship to a piece of media. A relationship you form while engaging with it that enlivens your life and has the potential to broaden your horizons. But we live in a moment where it's very popular to talk about "the right understanding of media"[1] and therefor everyone begins to need to explain their relationship to every piece of media to their friends.
The bare experience of reading The Baroque Cycle completely stuffed full of historical references you don't understand is kind of its own immersive experience in a less media-rich climate. You kind of get a sense what it might be like to have no access to education and run into like, Leonardo da Vinci or whoever. But then it comes time to explain that experience to someone else and they might think you were silly for not just looking the names up.
I just think it's too bad. I once almost broke my wrist snow boarding, but my friend wanted to finish the day so I hung out in our car. The medics had given me a dose of percocet[2] for the pain and I had just started Neuromancer. Finishing that book in that hot car, slightly high, has both erased all of "what happens" from my mind and left me with this kind of indelliable feeling of what it was like to be reading the book. I didn't understand it and feel all the better for it.
[1] I think it's very easy to understand why people want to set others straight on points like this, even if I don't like the ecosystem it creates.
[2] I think it was percocet? Though it seems odd that I would be given a dose of narcotics for a bad sprain.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#13When I was 11 I was attracted to the cover of a book that showed some boats sailing on a terraformed Mars. Reading Blue Mars, the final book in the series, at age 11 totally blew my mind. Not only was I already scientifically inclined, so Sax's explanations of the world and descriptions of materials science really expanded my 'scope of the possible' (even if a bunch of the high tech stuff was hand wavy), this book al…
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Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#14Those that read 'The Book of the New Sun' will know the feeling
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#15A useful habit that I've begun to follow with more complicated books—especially when reading them out of personal interest—is to actively avoid taking notes or worrying about background material on a first read. I've recently read and greatly enjoyed a historical fiction novel called "Augustus" written by John Edward Williams and published in 1972. On the surface level, it's about the events of the life of Augustus C…
Fascinating. My first response to your opening paragraph was horror - how on Earth could you hope to really internalize and learn from a textbook without taking notes on it? - before realizing that you were (mostly) referring to fiction or entertainment media. In which case, yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you - don't do anything to pull yourself out of the story, remain immersed and (if it's a well-structured work) it will start to make sense to you.
I did take notes throughout my first playthrough of Elden Ring, for instance, and started enjoying it a lot more once I stopped!
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#16When I was about 14 years old, my parents saw my interest in electronics and computers and went to a university professor they knew and purchased 6-7 books on various topics. (Mostly electrical engineering and some programming)
They were designed for 2nd or 3rd year university students, and they were way wayyyy beyond me, but I used to read them, over and over, and slowly parts of them were becoming clearer to me, even the bits I didn’t understand (at all) must have been going into my memory because later when the concepts started to click, then the connections were being made.
It took me years, I read the books many times over and over all through my teens. Reading books I don’t understand has become a lifelong joy for me, just yesterday I got my subscription to “Advanced Materials” and I have thousands of articles to read!
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#17A useful habit that I've begun to follow with more complicated books—especially when reading them out of personal interest—is to actively avoid taking notes or worrying about background material on a first read. I've recently read and greatly enjoyed a historical fiction novel called "Augustus" written by John Edward Williams and published in 1972. On the surface level, it's about the events of the life of Augustus C…
I finished Infinite Jest without taking notes. I definitely missed a lot of stuff but I loved the experience and it ended up being one of my favorite books.
I think Infinite Jest is a great example for this sort of thing because I later realized that I had completely missed the entire main plot. By the author:
> There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.
Nothing converged for me at all and yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I’m still not quite sure what to think of that.
Aaron Swartz (yep, that Aaron Swartz) wrote a great essay that explains the ending and main plot in clear language:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
But I don’t think I got any part of that plot by reading the book. It’s all hidden and disjointed, and there’s so much interesting stuff at the surface that you almost don’t even care to go deeper.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#18Those that read 'The Book of the New Sun' will know the feeling
The unreliable narrator doesn't help either.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#19I do like some "hard" fiction like the Stephenson mentioned in TFA, as well as Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but my mind immediately went to some of the harder technical writing I've enjoyed - The Art of Computer Programming; SICP and other Lisp texts, math books, etc.
I once spent a very pleasant short vacation on a beach on Lake Michigan reading Peter Gabriel Bergmann's "Introduction to the Theory of Relativity," finding pleasure in gradually unraveling the notation, the mathematics, and the ideas, in a quiet and beautiful setting.
It always surprises me when I meet engineers who don't enjoy reading technical books, but different strokes and all that. It takes a kind of patience and persistence to unravel a technical text, which can be its own reward if you're not trying to solve a specific technical problem at the moment.
Re: The joy of reading books you don't understand
#20When I was about 14 years old, my parents saw my interest in electronics and computers and went to a university professor they knew and purchased 6-7 books on various topics. (Mostly electrical engineering and some programming) They were designed for 2nd or 3rd year university students, and they were way wayyyy beyond me, but I used to read them, over and over, and slowly parts of them were becoming clearer to me, ev…
Both you and your parents sound so cool!
This brought a smile to my face - thanks for sharing. :-)