Author: dlongm01

I set out to write a book review this evening, my reaction to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I’ll do that later, (follow the link to ‘Reviews’ on the blog title page) but I got sidetracked by the fact that I could recall only a vague outline of what that story was about until I read it for the second time in order to write a review.

So here’s a short (draft) essay about the challenge that our online cultural conduit presents to those of us, like me, who still like to read in preference to listening to podcasts or watching youtube vids. (Reading isn’t better or worse than those media, it’s just that reading is what I have grown up with).

Of course I read this book. Twice. The first time when it appeared in 2021 and then more recently when the film version was announced. I found that, honestly, I could not remember much of the story when I picked it up for the second time. I was a little alarmed that I had read a 400 page sci-fi novel but retained only the sketchiest notion of how the story went.

On a sidenote this is partly a symptom of the new times we live in where the deluge of reading content has become so very great. Not so long ago, back in the 1980s or so, this was already a theme of literary criticism – that so many novels were being published that it was impossible to read more than a tiny fraction of the output of a thriving publishing industry (as it was at the time).

It seems to be generally reckoned that by the end of the 1700s there was only a  small number of enthusiasts for the printed word who were reputed to have read just just about every book that had been published. Personally I suspect that this threshold was crossed much earlier than that (perhaps 1650ish) but certainly by the end of the C20th it was impossible not merely to read every published book but even to keep track of them outside the more organised panopticon of a national library.

My point is only to excuse or justify my poor recollection of the book I want to review. It may be that my memory is not as good as it was (I am somewhere on the older side of 50) and what with wonky eyesight and fatigue it is so much harder to read with focus and with absorption in a culture, specifically our online culture, where books of all kinds are both rapidly made available for purchase or piracy and also advertised, often more than once, as worthy of one’s attention through the streamed transmission of review‘formats’ of many types. (Not so long ago, around the beginning of the C21st, a great deal of print was devoted to the topic of the ‘attention economy’, a topic that is now, itself, drowned in the ocean of digital content).

This vast undergrowth of literature puts a premium on filtering, not merely as a technical operation – setting computer rules to restrict what feeds show you – but also cognitive control, rules-of-the-mind that enable one to ignore some things.

Yet even this does not really control the flow for it simply keeps coming as if filtering itself increases both the relevance as well as the quantity of what ‘comes your way’. The only true solution is to turn it off, or at the very least develop a monomaniac trait, a ‘one track mind’, look at just one type of content and wilfully ignore the wider contexts in which those things that demand my attention are embedded.

The digital medium has no natural ‘walls’ in the way that print used to have. Back-in-the-day I would go on holiday and take at most two or three books with me and then only if there was carry-room in my baggage. Today I take my e-reader, lightweight and no bulkier than a small A5 notepad on which I carry over 30 books some of which in print form would be 800 page doorstops!

My e-reader has storage space for a couple of thousand more if I wanted them on hand (as it were) without adding any physical bulk or weight to my travel baggage. I wouldn’t do that of course, because even a small library of 30 books simply imposes the same kinds of demands on my attention. I’m on holiday after all!  (And that also raises the seriously problematic issue of how e-readers are designed in both soft and hardware to enable managing, searching, or annotating texts … but that is another essay!)