After Malcolm X was released from prison in 1952, a writer from London called him to conduct an interview. One of the questions he asked Malcolm was, “What’s your alma mater?” His response was, “Books.”
Sentenced to ten years in prison on burglary charges, Malcolm X refused to wallow in self-pity during his time behind bars. Instead, he educated himself by reading widely and often. In his autobiography, he recalls reading until three in the morning with only a sliver of light shining through the bars of his cell.
“No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me,” he said. “The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
But he wasn’t reading to boost his status or to earn a degree. He was reading because he was genuinely curious and hungry for truth. He understood that personal experience could only take one so far in life.
Today we are not confined by prison walls, but by a seemingly inescapable multitude of distractions and trivial obligations. The times have changed, but we still face the same decision that Malcolm X did: sit idly as the world passes by, or take the initiative to immerse ourselves in things that challenge us, guide us, and build character.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American adult reads only 19 minutes per day. The number is likely lower for college students who juggle classes, jobs, homework, internships, sports, and a social life. If we want to carve out time to read, something has to go. Most of these obligations are non-negotiable; but attending every single class? Not so much. So why not skip once in a while?
College is important for developing social intelligence and time management skills. But when it comes to understanding the big picture and cultivating intuition, sitting through PowerPoint slides and monotonous group projects won’t cut it.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” said Mark Twain.
The world doesn’t give a shit that you go to college. What matters is what you do while you’re there, what you have to show for it. And if making the most of your four years means skipping a few gen-ed lectures to read the autobiography of a Holocaust survivor or how an obscure ancient philosophy can change your life, so be it.
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We turn to our phones to dilute our insecurities, confusion, stress, discomfort, and loneliness. We convince ourselves that phones offer relaxation and escape, but in reality they leave us in a worse mood. They stifle our ability to think deeply or creatively and leave us with nothing but a despondent feeling and a craving for the next flurry of notifications. The promises of comfort and security are seductive, but nevertheless empty.
The smell of coffee wafts over to me, so I take a detour to the aisle of its origins. As I pretend to read the labels on the absurd variety of organic coffees, I listen intently as a thin bearded man yammers about grinding his beans at home. Whole Foods reminds me that I may want to do the same, so as not to transfer any non-organic coffee dust into my morning brew. After all, Whole Foods’ grinders process conventional coffee, too. I stoop down to check out a coffee brewer that “blends art and science to create the ultimate coffee experience.” I wonder if my mom’s Mr. Coffee has, unbeknownst to her, been spoiling her coffee experience all these years. Maybe I should buy her this for Christmas.
“Winning is not enough,” says Ryan Holiday in Ego is the Enemy. “People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”
I was forced to read several excerpts from this book for a class a while back, but it wasn’t until I re-read the whole thing on my own time that I realized why this book is an Amazon bestseller even though Amazon didn’t even exist when it was published. Written in 1985, Neil Postman expresses his concern for a culture saturated with television. But the parallels between his predictions for television and today’s Internet culture are eerily similar. Postman noticed the seeds of a revolution taking place: that all experience, from politics to religion to news, was taking the form of entertainment and impairing our ability to think critically. He notes that we now expect everything we consume to be pre-packaged, simplified, and dramatized. This trend, according to Postman, leaves no room for rational discussion, debate, or complexity. The result? The only things that reach us are those deemed “amusing.” Never mind if they are helpful or true. This book is just as relevant now as it was over 30 years ago, and well worth the quick read (163 pages) if you want to take a step back from a tech-filled life.
The argument that technology, particularly social media, has brought us closer together is a seductive one. But Turkle’s research here suggests that technology has isolated us more than anything. How often do we confuse Instagram likes with companionship or texting with intimate conversation? Based on 15 years of research and hundreds of interviews, Alone Together explores the human consequences of allowing technology into the aspects of our lives where it doesn’t belong, namely interpersonal relationships. “Relentless connection leads to a new solitude,” says Turkle. “We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.” The book is alarmingly critical, but ultimately encouraging as it asserts that we, as distinct human beings, deserve better than tweets, artificial intelligence, and text messages.
Arguably the most influential book on media culture ever written, Daniel Boorstin holds up a metaphorical mirror to American society and raises concerns regarding our ability to distinguish illusion from reality. Boorstin theorizes that pseudo events, the manufactured junk we watch on our screens 24/7 which exist solely for the purpose of being talked about, have seduced and corrupted us to the point that we no longer want to experience real life. When The Image was published in the 1960s, Boorstin was mostly concerned about TV pundits and manufactured gossip. And while these are still prevalent today, the basic theme of the pseudo event is in direct line with today’s social media and pop culture: we concern ourselves with appearance and non-reality so much that we foster unrealistic expectations for ourselves. Boorstin’s insights shine a bright light on the question of why we’re so dissatisfied with life. A thoughtful yet hard-hitting book, The Image should be read by anyone wishing to get back in touch with reality.
Every day a new trend or hashtag seems to beg for our attention online: a political scandal, a celebrity breakup, if you want a story you can find it. But how many of them actually last longer than a day or two? The problem is that there’s so many of these “nano-stories” that our brain’s attention span literally can’t process all of it. We become impotent when we try to have an in-depth conversation about a complex topic because we’ve been acclimated to the tweet, the soundbite, the Vine, the Snapchat, and other types of fragmented information. Bill Wasik offers a well-researched but humorous tour of our hollowed-out media environment, citing the dramatic rise and fall of pop bands and political blogs to illustrate how and why anybody with Internet access can snatch our attention and essentially create something out of nothing. Wasik isn’t calling for us to become completely tech-free or go back to snail mail. But by dissecting this new form of information dissemination, he is calling us to reflect on our habits and to seek more sustainable methods of information consumption.
We have a tendency to consider entertainment as a separate entity from “serious” things, but Gabler observes that the ever-widening reach of TV and other media have turned such serious things like politics, literature, religion, and even our own lives, into one vast fantasyland. We can see the evidence for this claim everywhere we look; the determining factor for whether something is important is not its truthfulness, value, or quality, but its ability to entertain or amuse us. I guarantee this book will make you do a double-take and contemplate on what Gabler says is our “bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama.” Like many of the books on this list, Life: The Movie is prophetic in that Gabler’s observations have proved to be equally if not more relevant today as they were when he wrote the book in 2000.
Originally published in a 1981 issue of The New Yorker, George W.S. Trow repurposed his classic work in 1997 with a new foreword in book form. Here, Trow offers a scathing critique of what he saw as the failings of an American culture that placed television as its center of attention. Trow’s work has been described as “half brilliant, half insane.” Nevertheless, I found his insights to be shockingly reflective of what happens when an entire generation grows up on game shows, trivia, and sitcoms, all of which provide no real basis or structure for learning – hence, no context. It’s sometimes difficult to read books that paint such a bleak picture, but I think it’s impossible to navigate our 21st century media nightmare without understanding how we got here in the first place.
I was captured enough by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death that I picked up this book by him as well. Although everything he writes tends to have a sobering effect on the reader, it’s still somehow pleasurable to read. In this case it’s his call to reevaluate an American culture that fetishizes technology and values such technologies over our own human progress. “We tell ourselves that [technology] will lead to a better life…we proceed under the the assumption that information is our friend” writes Postman. “But it is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” Many of us, myself included, are blind to how our daily lives are colored by the technologies we passively allow into our lives. Postman possessed a rare ability to identify these trends before their effects set in. I don’t think his intention was to scare us away from TV (or the Internet today), but rather to make us aware of how we are shaped by such things and what we can do about that.
An unapologetic cultural critic, Hedges fearlessly exposes the dark consequences of allowing fantasy to overshadow reality in America. He argues that the celebrity gossip, trash-talk news, and mindless trivia that fill our lives are the product of a culture that is a-literate; that is, we are able to read, but choose not to. “We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image,” Hedges writes. “The culture of illusion reduces us to the level and dependency of children. It impoverishes language.” Written in 2009, Hedges predictions, namely predicting the rise of a Trump-like figure, are shockingly accurate. Although graphic at times, it’s a book that should be read often to bring us back down to Earth.
