Books (also J names)

This is a movie/media blog (which technically encompasses books as well, but...), so here's a movie review:

Julie and Julia is both a book and a movie. You probably knew about the movie. And the book. Probably. But MORE probably, you knew about the movie, cause it's out in theaters right now, and that's where I saw it on Wednesday night.

I'm beginning to suspect that Meryl Streep is mentoring Amy Adams. It's a good match--they're both absolutely brilliant actresses, but very different in style and range. I think Streep can probably do anything, and Amy Adams has this ability to cause every single person in the world to fall in love with her, and believe completely in her sweetness. She gets her audiences thinking, "Well, if she's really that wonderful, then I guess the world can't be that bad after all." (It is--but she certainly makes it better.)

All I need to say to qualify my deep approval for this endearing film about French cooking is that it was adapted and directed by Nora Ephron (You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally). Also, not for the sake of redundance but in spite of it, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep are really, really grand (see: Doubt).

But this post is really about books.

I went walking through the library today (BYU has one of the largest and most awesome libraries this side of anywwhere), shopping for a new stockpile. I like to have two or three books out at a time so that if I finish one, I can go ahead and just start on another that same day or the next. Or, if I don't end up liking one of them, I can switch with terrible swiftness.

I just finished the 2nd book in the Rigante series by David Gemmell (whom I love), and now it's time for a change of scenery. So I went through my Goodreads account and picked out a handful of titles that sounded good--"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy (an author I've been meaning to read for over a year now), "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick, and "Embraced by the Light," which is an I-died-and-came-back book by Bettie J. Eadie (and Curtis Taylor, who happens to be the father of one of my very good friends.)

Libraries are magnificent structures. They are deep repositories of human knowledge, collected, refined, and utilized over the thousands of years of our recorded history. Granted, the vast bulk of it all has been written, printed, and distributed within the past few hundred years, but even so, all of the words we write and the thoughts we think are at least subtley influenced by the countless generations that have spanned the preceding millenia. Walk into a library, and you have entered a sacred place where knowledge and understanding have been worshipped since recorded time began.

There is a trend, in the rush to modernization, toward perfect efficiency and absolute convenience. In a digital age, we welcome the steady decline of wasted paper that creates mounds of transiently useful printed material. We think, all of us, even if we forever refuse to admit it, that hard copied, flesh and blood books will eventually die out. To look out over the world at production management and streamlined industry, the printing, sale, and reading of actual, physical books does seem to be an increasingly dated artifact of an older society. We'll keep them around for a while as a memory. We'll put them on shelves and never read them (much like we do already). The ones people actually read will go into museums before they've had a chance to turn to dust, a right to which all living things are ultimately entitled.

We know they'll die. We know it. Things like the Kindle are a meager beginning to what our immediate future surely holds. Eventually, a la the iPhone, we will all purchase some brand of some device that really does do it all, including store every book we could ever read or possess in a lifetime.

And why not? It's more efficient that way. Cheaper. More sure. Once something gets saved digitally and globally, it's forever. The data of our public consciousness is backed up and then backed up again. The words of this blog might not ever really die--who knows?

In this line of thinking, however, lies our greatest misunderstanding about ourselves. We built computers to increase our productivity, and thank the heavens for it. But we are not like what we've built. We have not created computers in our own image, we have created them in the likeness of machines, without aspirations, dreams, or comprehensions. Once we built them, however, we somehow began to worship their god: Efficiency. Not all of us, but an ever-expanding number of us. And even those who do not bow to this god believe in its existence and omnipotence. The older generations meekly accept that this god will one day cow the world. "Every knee shall bow...even if I don't, my kids, or their kids, will."

Maybe. But it will be a false god, and will only shrink and diminish us. We are physical creatures. Efficiency can be a virtue, like fire, but it must be used, not worshipped. Our bodies must be in motion, and our hands must be at work, no matter the power and utility of our machines, or we will die by becoming less than what we've built.

Pull a book from a shelf. Open it. Read it. Turn its pages and let it speak to you as only it can. Have you ever noticed how silent the words on a screen are? Those words are not meant for hands. They are aritifices, illusions, unfiltered information. They have they're use (as I, sitting here and typing my thoughts, obviously believe), but they are more limiting than we usually realize.

Reading a book is somewhat sedentary, but it is natural and powerful. When we read something projected into our eyes, nothing else moves. Our bodies are captive. The orbs in our heads flick back and forth almost imperceptibly, but our flesh is motionless. What happens after several hours in front of a screen? You fidget. Your body shifts, stretches, writhes. These are the motions of attempted escape.

Of course it is far from impossible to read too much, whether it be from a computer or from bound sheets of paper--either way, an excess of physical inactivity is supremely unhealthy. But books are better for your soul, and by that I mean the combination of body and spirit (or mind, if that suits you). We are dual, composite creations. Books are good, and not only because they have assisted us in our intellectual evolution--not just as a stepping stone toward perfect efficiency. They must endure because we need them in order to remember who we are.

It's nothing new to say that we've lost as much wisdom as we've gained knowledge. We know so much, but the stature of our minds seems to be shrinking. How much of what afflicts us as modernized human beings could be amelioratedo mended by the simple action of picking up a book in your hands? And opening the cover. And turning the pages....

And reading.