On the importance of reading
The Studio Edit: your weekly curated, not calculated, curiosity feed
This week I read a number of essays focussed on the importance of reading. I started with George Orwell’s Books v Cigarettes - a very funny argument that books are cheaper than people think - at least compared with what we'll happily pay for cigarettes:
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them.
- Books v Cigarettes, George Orwell
Orwell calculates that reading is cheaper than smoking and drinking (still true, by the way), and concludes it's the second-cheapest hobby going - beaten only by listening to the radio.
I couldn’t agree more.
Buying books used to be about wanting to read them. Now it's increasingly about how they'll look on the shelf for the next 'shelfie' on Bookstagram or BookTok. So many people find the irony in the Japanese term Tsundoku but as Dylan Joseph essay articulately puts it - this is just consumerism. He argues that fast fashion is now fast fiction - and gives the…
