In the immortal movie, "Ghostbusters", the receptionist comments that Dr. Egon Spengler is so smart, he must read a lot.
To which he replies, "Print is dead."
I disagree. I am in love with print. I still read actual newspapers, would you believe? And I love books. Love them, love them. The good ones have useful information, the very good ones have useful ideas. Text on the web, of course, is one way of acquiring major amounts of info--if you're handy with a search engine, can weed out the absolute garbage, and are a speed reader. Oh, and can bookmark everything, which is...unwieldy (I never get to use that word. Unwieldy. It's like, a word, that is exactly what it means. You know, like the way awkward is spelled.)
Ah, you know I'm not going to hand you some corny old "Reading is FUN-damental", right? Right.
I think I really got into books when I realized that there were books I wasn't supposed to read. I guess this sound like it is going to be one of those, "Oh, great, girl genius holds forth about reading the Bible when she's six" or, "Oh great, here's a list of porn through the ages," but really, while the Bible was a stimulating read in my formative years, and there is some truly edifying porn (the Victorian stuff is pretty raw...seriously) out there, I think what I'm getting at is, books broaden your perspective. They show you places you haven't been. They tell you about things you don't know. They suck you into another person's head-space. They expose you to thoughts you may not have considered.
Take the sf novels of Robert Heinlein. I cut my big girl teeth on those. When I was reading them, I figured it was just ordinary science fiction--but as I get older, I wonder if there's any such thing. If you're familiar with his stuff, you probably know what the appeal was, but if not...get a hold of these titles: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Methuselah's Children, Time Enough for Love, Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond Sunset. His is a universe populated, it seems, with smart, oversexed people who live incredible life spans and travel through space, time, and multiple universes. When I went through my very weird adolescence, I used to dream that I was really, somehow, you know, through an odd turn of events, related to the Lazarus Long and fam (because no one in my family had red hair, or was a "brain"), and they'd find me, and I'd go to Tertius and become a time traveler. I'd learn how to do stuff some scientists say can't be done...and I wouldn't feel like a huge weirdo.
Of course, it's a nice fantasy for a fourteen year old who has already decided that she knows what she wants to be (a geneticist, like Ishtar) when she grows up and can already feel her little world tightening around her. But those books also introduced me to a kind of freethought, to polyamory and to a logical approach to taboos and local customs, to a different way of looking at the future, at morality, at religion. I began to look at the world around me differently, too, at the people I knew and the school I went to and things like that. I realized I might need to be a little unorthodox to get where I was going.(Out. Away. To wherever the wild geese were going.)
Luckily, everyone suspected I was just fascinated with rocket ships--but no. It was rocket ships--and sex.
Heresies have a way of piling up. You may casually pick up some Norman Spinrad, or a little Huxley, of course, but then somebody leaves a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy on your doorstep with a cryptic note reading only :Fnord, and the next thing you know, you're a Buddhist existentialist working to undermine the gov't as an agent for the Black Hand. Or something to that effect. RAW and Robert Shea's 70's classic kind of surprises me with each reread, if only because I keep running into the same usual suspects. I think there *is* a conspiracy. It's a badly-run run, silly one, so I'm not too worried. (As for being a Buddhist existentialist undermining the government as an agent for the Black Hand--I made that up. Because if I were, I wouldn't tell you. And if I weren't, that's the sort of thing I'd want to you to *think*. Especially if I were working for the other guys. And you know who they are. Or at least, we know who you are.) I recommend Robert Anton Wilson for straightforward complexity, experienced gullibility and flexible scepticism. And for good writing, which usually makes for good reading.
Of course, I've *had* (as in--wanted) to read some things that related to my own particular field of interest (no, I'm not into the porn yet--sheesh!) I'm talking about science stuff. If you're feeling adventurous, I've got some recommendations for you.
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, and if you like this one, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker are some more really good ones. I haven't made up my mind that I'm a strict neo-Darwinist--I mean, I've got a little motto which makes people cringe (Want to hear it? " Occam's Razor doesn't cut *everything*") but natural selection certainly is the main force. I've heard people use the argument that it doesn't explain the great variety of life--heck--I think it's the only thing that explains it adequately. It's a big, weird, dangerous, occasionally environmentally unstable world out there--no wonder it's got all these wild things in it.
The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, although part of me has not entirely decided that I want to call it "science", as there is equal reason to consider it psychology and history and sociology and a few other things. It's an ambitious book, I'll give it that, which gave me an awful lot to think about (which having read RAW and other kind of *counterculture* authors, I was prepared for). I wish I could say I disagree with what could be viewed as a negative picture of the human species--a violent, tribal bunch still acting on deep, dark instincts that are not generally altruistic by any stretch, but rather, embody all those things we think of as "evil". Except I see what he's talking about when I pick up the paper. Many of the people I've met in this life are not *modern* people, and one or two could actually be referred to as "barbarians." Heck, I've fought with them. I recommend the "read-twice" method with it--one time to find what you disagree with, and once to try to see his point of view.
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, by Matt Ridley--is so fabulous if you want to know what this "Human Genome Project thing" is about. (I guess you all know it's kind of near and dear for me.I consider it a better Game than the one I'm involved in, with more rewarding prizes, since I can see the good we might be able to do in terms of human health, happiness, and longevity if we only had a better understanding of what makes us tick. For the alternate point of view, I can point you towards Jeremy Rifkin's The Biotech Century for some ideas about what can go wrong--or you can just take a hard look at Danger Girl the Biohazard Babe and Deadly Genetically Engineered Virus Maven--I'm humble on that score.) It's informative, involving, interesting, and well-written, and it reminded me of things I'd forgotten, like polygenic conditions and environmental factors...but enough about me. For people who aren't me, this will give you a good appreciation for the work that's going into mapping the genome, the complexity of what really is an enormous task, the sheer amount of data that is coded into the mother-long protein strand coiled up in our cells--and if you check out the section on Chromosome Fourteen, you'll see the little snippet of info I'm fascinated with (the chapter is entitle"Immortality", and no, it isn't Immortality as I deal with it--but it's still interesting).
Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics , by Nick Herbert, as well as Quantum Reality. I suppose the big reason I enjoyed these was because they got me back to thinking about those Heinlein novels, and my fascination with time travel and multiverse theory. I've never really bogged down and concentrated on physics, but as a wise man once said, "Specialization is for insects." Quantum Reality gives good, clear descriptions, explanations and examples of some of the more unique facets of our world when looked at on the quantum level, and FTL: SLiP expands on some of the faster than light possibilities that are mentioned in Quantum Reality. By the time he got to Frank Tipler's model of an infinite rotating cylinder, I was mentally heading to the drawing board (well...we can do finite...and long, and there's centrifugal force..and then the math on the contraction of time and space as the thing picked up speed started making me cross-eyed...). Yep. These'll get you stoked about physics. (Oh, and check out Physics on All Fours, his poetry. It's lovesongs to the whole of the mystery, and with language that isn't shy about it. Good stuff.)