What are books for?

Sometimes you read a book and it pisses you off. I read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth when I was a Junior in college and threw it against the wall of my living room because it seemed to me like a four hundred page waste of my time. No doubt there was something in there of worth, but I read books hoping for a punch in the face and all I got from that one was a spiny powder-puff. Not to say that it was actually worthless; I'm sure from the right angle it was revolutionary, but I wasn't at that angle. A classic it's not you, it's my twenty-first century white male perspective sort of thing. At any rate it sucked.

Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.

Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.

It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.