NORTHERN PLANNER

Books are not better than other media, just different. And I think there’s a reason books will always have place, or at least long-form written communication. While visual media can be brilliant, and so can the quick fixes you get on the web, a problem can be missing out the nuance and complexity of longer collections of writing.

I don’t just mean that reading can be more demanding and therefore more rewarding, although that’s kind of true, it’s that they’re better for getting accross more complex detail. When you read a book, you’re not forced to follow a director’s pace, or make do with a quick snapshot that misses the real meat. You can stop and start when you want, you can linger over a certain point or even go back and read it again. This is great for fiction but even better for factual books and text books.

At the recommendation of Mr PH Colman I’m going to read Richard Dawkin’s ‘The God Delusion’. I flicked over it in Borders and I can already see it’s well written, full of complex argument and ideas. I won’t want to rush it, I’ll want to stop and pondera particular point, or grapple with an argument, maybe reading it a couple of times before moving on. It’s a bit like that when you read a textbook at school. You don’t read it once, you keep coming back again and again.

With other media you lose the depth, but you also have to fit in with the pace someone else has set for you. When it comes to really learning something new, and squeezing every drop from each sentence, it’s hard to think of a better medium than books, or for that matter, the meatier articles and essays in newspapers and some magazines.