Can you throw away books? Many of us can’t.
Good books are like old friends. We appreciate the amount of time someone took to write these stories and set them on paper. We want to make sure our books are taken care of. If there’s no more room on our shelves (because we’ve made new friends), we go looking for someone to adopt them.
In a work environment like ours, where so many people read, this has taken on an institutional character. Colleagues of mine have gone from one office to the next, trying to find takers for books they just can’t bear to throw out.
An altar to reading
To save time, though, others have constructed what might charitably be called an altar to literacy in one corner of the Spotlight kitchen. The books that have accumulated there are not someone’s old friends. They are more like old, mangy dogs that their owners no longer wish to keep and that the rest of us can’t bear to see put to sleep.
The classic for many months running was a book called Endlich über vierzig!, about all the things women can look forward to when they’re finally past the age of 40. The “featured title” of the past year or so has been Guido Westerwelle’s “politische Biografie”, the title of which someone has crossed out and replaced with “ein Witzbuch”.
The most recent addition to this, um, compost heap was a small pile of Time and Newsweek magazines from earlier this year. Although it is the job of these magazines to be up to date, it is shocking to see just how quickly they go out of date. Their topics included “The Remarkable Rise of Rick Santorum” (remember him?), Vladimir Putin’s allegedly tenuous grip on power (disproven by his re-election a couple of weeks later), and the life and death of singer and drug addict Whitney Houston. One headline asked: “What Would Steve [Jobs] Do?” while another simply read: “Arab Spring Not Over Yet”.
I did read these magazines when they came out, and I’m sure they made me better informed in that week or that month. But five months later, am I still better informed, or is my head full of useless, outdated information?
What makes it news?
As the leading print sources of international news in the United States, Time and Newsweek are at one end of the scale. At the other end are the daily newspapers.
With shrinking circulations caused by more and more free news content, American newspapers are struggling to remain viable. The once-venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer — now reduced to an online-only version — has stayed above water by focusing on local stories and practical information, such as TV and movie schedules. Look at the headlines, though, and you’ll find mainly photos of celebrities and a roster of who was killed the day before. Is it news? I suppose. Is it relevant? Not to me.
Television news, too, has become monotonous. Shrinking budgets have left news teams with no alternative but to cover the same stories again and again and to interview spokespersons and other journalists instead of experts.
But where depth is lacking, breadth has appeared. All of us now have access to many more news sources than we ever dreamed existed — and they are different. American TV news focuses on crime, disaster and missing white women, while German TV news focuses on meetings of bureaucrats and the crisis in Lampukistan.
With a variety of sources, you can piece together what’s going on and decide what’s important. Then, at some point, forget the details. There are only so many of them, or so many jokes about Germany’s unpopular foreign minister, that are worth remembering.
