Sitting at my desk, my attention drifted to the books sitting in a pile to my right. Reading their spines, I noticed that read together, they form a sort of collective wisdom:
- You are what you choose and the rest is noise
- The presentation of self in everyday life ways of seeing
- Digital ground frame analysis
- How kindergarten came to America musicophilia
(Admittedly that last one might be stretching a bit.)
It struck me that when I read, what I want is to see connections among texts, draw similarities, and here, very literally, the spines were doing it in a way I’d never attended to.
Then Jonathan Alger pointed out Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project, which has been going on since 1993 (a test of endurance if there ever was one).
Collective wisdom, as it happens, can be found wherever you’d like to collect it.
