One of the things that has changed while living alone is the abundance of time I spend alone. Sometimes it’s creepy because of all the time I spend talking into the mirror. Although the majority of the conversations I have with myself I enjoy because I tend to learn something.
Tonight is the first night I’ve been home recently and I got to talking. I was pursing for a book when my ego decided to be inquisitive and question why I primarily read non-fiction.
I have always pegged it as a preference for real world knowledge. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize the wealth of applicable knowledge in fictional stories, it was just easier for my brain to ponder, not imagine, the world from words that I knew represented a tangible truth.
But you know, that was a cop-out. There was more depth to my preference. It isn’t that I would rather not imagine. It is that I like learning how other people solve the problems around me.
I realized I tend to get on fixes; 6-8 months of focus on a given topic before I moving on.
As I move to a topic, I attack the literature: subscribe to media, find blogs, read industry publications, and (definitely) find books. All of this media convergence is painless in the context of the Internet and the efficiencies of this aggregation allows me to quickly quench my thirst for a given interest.
First it was oil and energy, then business, then business on the Internet, then to general economy, back to business on the Internet (when I realized I needed the backstory), then onto financial markets, and now I’m edging toward political history.
If you look at my Amazon.com Wish List you’ll see books that remain casualties of my relentless shifts of focus; unread simply because I’ve broken-up with their subject.
So why do I read the books I read? As I see it they are simply part of the literature now. And when I’m on a topic, I sample the literature.
