On Books
I am currently studying Systematic Zoology at Stockholm University (and one of these days I will share the link to the webpage I’m creating as a way of studying for the exam on December 20 - simply reading just doesn’t do it for me). I think this is possibly the first biology course I’ve taken where I haven’t felt the least inclined to buy the textbook. Or rather, I was going to, but didn’t, and after borrowing it from the head teacher for a while I realised that it’s not a book I’d particularly like in my collection. It’s simply too … boring.
This got me thinking about university course literature and the way it’s often treated by students, at least in Sweden. Science textbooks are usually ridiculously expensive over here, and students often have trouble actually affording to buy the literature assigned for each course we take. A solution is to buy used literature and sell your old books to the next batch of students taking the course. The publishers seemingly desperately try to avoid this by producing new editions as often as possible, but given how small the changes often are this can usually be worked around.
Whining about the cost of course literature wasn’t going to be the subject of this entry, though. Instead, I’m wondering at the rather odd way we for some reason value these books far lower than all the other books we collect in our shelves. The same people who can’t afford to buy a fat book on developmental biology will happily order Alastair Reynolds’ scifi novels from Amazon, and try to sell their plant physiology book while trying to complete their Jane Austen collection.
And yet - which books do we normally go back to and use again, in any way? Most fiction you only read once; a book really has to be very good for you to feel the urge to experience it again. But while I might not read my various biology books from cover to cover very often (or at all, ever), I frequently use them as a way to look up things I’ve forgotten or want to know more about. These books are actually useful to us, so why do we sell them? Why not get rid of the tedious classics or tacky fantasy that mostly serve as dust collectors anyway?
My theory is that it comes with the deeply ingrained idea that because you have chosen the subject as a career, the books are associated with work, and work = boring. So what if they’re useful, you’d rather have fun stuff around, right?
But … if you don’t think your subject is fun, why are you studying it in the first place?
I like to read fiction to relax. Unfortunately, I find most of it terribly formulaic and get frustrated when I solve the mystery long before I finish the book. On the other hand, a reader can never tell what direction non-fiction will take. It is, in many ways, far more interesting than fiction. Still, for those occasions when I need a quick, mindless fix, a mystery or spy novel will satisfy me.
Comment by the chaplain — December 5, 2007 @ 20:41