>Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh

Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging.

What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

> But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it.

Had to read this 3 times to parse the grammar.

Saying "the man" and then following up with "the fellow with the name" emphasies that who he was is less important than what he said; the fact that it's Solomon, writing Ecclesiastes (two names widely recognised in the Western canon) serve to emphasise this. EVEN THOUGH it's written by someone famous in a famous book, what he wrote is STILL more important than who he was. That is part of the meaning here. There's another level to it, as well; the author is well aware that he's out on a limb here and his jovial tone makes it clear that he's not taking himself too seriously.

Stripping it down to just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..." changes the meaning.

I suppose he could have explicitly said "Here are some words written by the famous person Solomon in the famous book Ecclesiastes, but the words are more important than who he was and the book he wrote, and I'm telling you this because it makes it clear how much more important the words are than the origin of them, but don't take me too seriously on this folks!" but that seems clunky.

The man who wrote it DOES matter, it DOES alter the effect. Solomon wrote it, in the book Ecclesiastes! Of course that makes a difference, and the writer here deliberately drew our attention to that. Dismissing a famous writer as unimportant carries more weigh than dismissing a complete unknown as unimportant.

This isn't some kind of simple logical operator statement that one can apply Boolean algebra to and simplify. This is already massively simplified; the writer expressed a lot of meaning in very few words. So much meaning, so compressed, that many readers think it's just the opposite - little information in too many words! People asking why this wasn't short are missing the fact that this IS the short version!

(Even if every deprecated end-point was described having a faint smell of boiled cabbage.)

> What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

The point was that he considered reading a "hobby" as much as breathing for himself. You have to include the rest of that paragraph though to see it:

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging. Reading happens to be my hobby, too, along with peristalsis and respiration.

From later in the article. I took the "whose name is now as lost" as a forward reference to the later concept. Reading so much that specific facts are lost (like who he was quoting) while retaining the understanding of the quote itself.

I think some commenters here are missing the intended tone of the article. It's supposed to be a confection, an amusing and self-deprecating defense of his old-fangled preferences, with a melancholy tinge about running out of time (the author is in his eighties).

Talk about annoyingly old fashioned and unnecessarily long. Let’s try:

“Solomon aka Ecclesiastes said...”

You know, using language for subtle humor rather than just brevity, which, if i recall correctly, he actually discussed this topic and dismisses the speed readers and those always looking for efficiency and speed: like speed eating or speed sex I believe the analogy was.

How was that?

In any case, I didn't get the impression he was restricting himself. He describes going into book shops picking up any book he happened to light upon. My feeling was that he had decided not to beat himself up if these books did not encompass everything in the entire world. After all, isn't that the central premise - life is short?

Your alternative subtitle is unnecessarily mean-spirited. I don't believe he was claiming to be in any way remarkable, in the end he was simply describing how he loves books.

Any given culture's canon is big in volume, but small in context.

2) Yes we should all seek to learn about other cultures and expand our horizons. But that hardly makes all of Western thought 'small' and 'provincial'. You are simply aping the view you are complaining about, only in the diametrically opposite direction.

Seriously learning about how the great minds of the past understood their world is, often, just as good a way of expanding our horizons, as reading from other cultures in the present. We are stretched by space and time.

Finally, I don't think you're taking seriously the limits that language places on our breadth of reading. Very few professional intellectual historians - let alone everyone else - know enough of the European languages to engage with anything but a small part of 'Western' thought.

I agree that we should strive to read more in non-Western languages, but it's very tough going.

The Bookish Life--obviously this will discuss a life built around books. Yeah, yeah, anyone could guess how it would end, i.e. there's little fortune in it.

How to Read and Why--interest. Purely so. You read slow because of your interest, you read because of your interest. Just as a foodie eats a dessert slowly because of his interest, he eats because of his interest. That a book-ie and a foodie would prefer one set of books or foods over another or over all others doesn't make the person less of a lover of their books or foods. That a foodie might prefer chopsticks over silverware, fingers or tortillas doesn't make their palate any less exquisite.

Tell me--would you consider Isaac Newton and Fyoder Dostoevsky small-minded because they tended to keep their reading Euro-centric as well?

And would I be right to charge anyone who hasn't the faintest interest in the Dalit literature of India or Japan, or in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter, or in the depths of Borges' poetry, etc., to be merely provincial? Or am I just being smug regarding my reading habits?

I recommend you re-read the piece with a little less hostility.

Thanks for this.

It reminds me that years ago I tried (unsuccessfully) to launch a "TL;DR" service for Hacker News articles. This is a small test I ran: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11193792