Mail me. Go home.
I used to have intentions of grandeur. I wanted to write a Rant About Stupid People. Then I realised that would be a thing the size of the full Cambridge English Dictionary- the multi-volume set. Which gives me the useful idea- I shall do individual rants about individual stupidities.
Our first entry shall be the book-non-seller. This may take some explaining- I do hope so, at any rate.
There was, briefly, a store in St Cloud called the "Paperback Trader."[1] The theory was that you could bring in your old books and trade them for other people's old books. You could of course buy them as well, but the emphasis here was trading. I fell into conversation with the owner. I was pleased to see more used book stores opening in the area, as it meant more books for less money, including a chance to find stuff that was out of print.
It turned out that his idea was not exactly the same. He could not understand why people would ever keep a book. After you've read it, that's it; it's over. It's not going to change. Why keep it? He didn't understand. I started to explain, and he started to sneer. "Oh, you're one of those people who thinks you can read it later and you'll be a different person and get something different out of it, right?"
The fact that I am not in jail is evidence of the unbelievable fact that I did not kill this moron. I often think of him and wish I had.
First, let us consider his sneer about people changing and reacting to the same material in different ways. If he has never experienced this, either he's never tried reading a book again, or he's never changed. If he's never tried it and still has the ignorance to claim that it isn't so, no more need be said. He's damned by his own stupidity right there. There would be no shame attached to reading a book twice, his friends would not point and laugh, he would lose nothing in the attempt. I will not say he has lost time while doing so because life is a long process of losing time while doing things, and he would lose no more then than by making other mistakes that would teach him things, as well. Assuming he has the intelligence to learn from mistakes, that is.
A little more complex, however, is proving the stupidity involved in his never changing. It's only a little more complex, though. Learning changes you. Any new fact might change your attitude or opinion on something. For example, look what happened when people learned copper and tin together were stronger than they were apart- you get the Bronze Age. That changed things. And if you didn't know before that that's what the Bronze Age was about, that might change how you understand things, too. So in order to have the same reaction every time you read a book, you'd have to be very careful you never learned anything. This is difficult to do if you read a lot. I suspect, though, that if you really tried and had a good grounding in stupidity to begin with, you could manage. So here, as well, I feel comfortable in declaring him one of the stupid.
My next possibility with this fool was that it might be a reflection on his reading matter. If you read Dick and Jane when you're five, and then read it again when you're twenty-five, chances are it isn't going to be different again when you're forty. But if you read Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden, for example, and you've never read Plato or Derida or Marx, you will have a different reaction to Ryman's book if you read some Plato or Marx before going back and trying again. And since you've now read Marx, you might want to have a go at Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal, but you'll then find you need to read some Trotsky and other economic and philosophy classics. Oh, plus the Illuminatus books, and some Monty Python, among others. Then try Stone Canal again, and it'll all fit a little better. Books build up in layers and influence each other.
Another example of that would be claiming it only takes one reading of Steven Brust's books in order to get everything out of them. If you can read those and get it all in one go, you are a genius that the world should fear. There is simply too much going on. There are too many clues and hints and references in too many different orders and places and you can't possibly think you'll get them all on one time through. Most of them you won't even notice until you're told that yes, they did amount to something. Then you realise how many you didn't get, and how many you did get but have not yet achieved a sort of terminal velocity. You will not be satisfied with reading those books once. You cannot be.
And what about any mystery book? There are some very clever books out there that are very nearly two books in one; you read the first time for the plot and to find out what happens, then you have to read it again to see just how the author managed it, and see what else was happening the whole time.
Which leads to the biggest objection of all: this man assumes that because he is stupid, so is everyone else. I am a writer. I write things. I didn't wake up one morning and decide I would now be a writer. I fumbled around for years, and then found someone who could teach me, and it turned out there's a lot of reading needed to make someone into a writer. You can't read just for fun because the book is good. You also have to try to see how the author achieves this- what makes the book fun? How does he hide the clues that those two people are actually the same person? How does she work in the research on the early days of England? What makes you think one golem is more mad than another? Why didn't you see that the other character had fallen in love first? It never ends. And when you read a book the first time, you don't know to look for those two people in the same room, or bits of background that weren't necessary to the plot, or the sanity of golems or the attraction of a polar bear. You didn't know those things were going to happen, and didn't know to keep an eye on it. If the books are successful, you won't even remember, after just one reading, how you learned that the polar bear was in love or the golem was insane. And after the second reading, you won't remember all the clues you had to those two characters being a single person, even then. You'll have gotten distracted by the fact that another character had the wrong eye colour on page nine, and you'll be wondering what that might mean, if anything.
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." Also sprach George Bernard Shaw. Just because that man never thought about anything he read, that does not mean I am as stupid as he is. That does not mean all his customers are that stupid. I will keep my books after reading them, thank you very much. I will read them again. I will check them for the source of that good quote that I didn't write down because I had no idea I was going to need it. I will go back and see yes, he did say "People's Front of Judea" and was corrected to "Judean People's Front," and that is from Monty Python, which is why it sounded familiar, and I will laugh. I will realise that later on there are more jokes that related to that idea, and I will re-read the book and find even more than I remembered.
Furthermore, I will continue to assume the worst when I see a house without bookshelves or an apartment without books. After all, once you've read the dictionary, it's not like it's going to have a different ending the second time around... or are you one of those people that thinks you'll get something different out of it the second time around?