Summer Reads and Literary Leads

IMHO you can never have too many bookshelves and I suppose I have more than most. Laid end-to-end, there are more than 50 meters of book shelving, which is roughly 160 feet. At a conservative average of 12 books to the foot, that's a lot of books in total. Certainly too many to count when there's a life to be lived, but there's probably a couple of thousand titles in all.

Visitors sometimes ask me if I've read them all, to which they get a 'yes-and-no' answer.  Given that my reading tends to be mostly non-fiction, I seldom read a book from cover to cover. I trawl through it for the information I need then store it on a shelf for future reference.

I like to think of it as a fairly dynamic process, given that books join my collection as my interests evolve and trickle away as they're lent and/or lost to friends and students. I often think I should use my book collection as a commercial asset and join the long tail of online second-hand book dealers. After all, that's where many of my books came from in the first place.

However, this Summer has been a bumper time for me in terms of the brilliant books I've enjoyed reading. It's a motley collection, but it may say something about what pushes my particular buttons. It will take several posts to do justice to them all, so I'll start with a book I bought by chance one day back in May.

Every so often, a book makes such an impression that it becomes a way-mark in your life. Thinking back over the years, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities was one such, as was Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

This year's contender was the awkwardly-titled The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford. It's a Penguin paperback that was more succintly-titled in its original US form as Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

Despite what I said earlier about non-fiction being essentially dip-in stuff,  this was a riveting cover-to-cover read. It's partly an autobiographical account of Crawford's dual careers as an academic and motorcycle mechanic, but it is also primarily a critique of the way we interact with the technology that has become such an essential part of our daily lives. For the most part, it's a technology that is not user-serviceable. As Crawford says, "What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed." (p.2)

He is passionately concerned at the general loss of manual competence this engenders; the loss of the ability or interest in using tools. Disappointingly but perhaps inevitably, the book offers no universal solution to the problem. The best the author can do is reaffirm the need for us each to take individual responsibility for the lives we lead, the kind of work we do and the way we interact with the technology we've increasingly come to depend upon.

It was an inspiring read which left me with an urge to read more about this topic. Richard Sennett's The Craftsman seems as good a starting point as any. His The Fall of Public Man is a book I always admired. The other book on my reading list is Peter Dormer's The Culture of Craft: Status and Future. There are other titles that look worth a read, but I've decided to start with these two.