Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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Have we always been this curious about others’ reading, or has this obsession to keep an eye out for random reading lists been fattened by the ease of sharing pictures and updates on social media? At one level, it’s a bit of stylised production, as people share their neat lists (of books to be read, books that have been read, books that are recommended, books on a particular subject, etc.) on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It can also be judgmental, as we track others’ reading (on their office tables, in their takeouts from libraries, through stray remarks and references, etc.) and form definite opinions about them. Perhaps, at a more meaningful level, these acts of sharing our own lists of favourites and recommendations are just more flamboyant and participatory manifestations of the abiding human need to organise our messy reading lives. Moreover, seeing another’s reading list, spying a bookshelf (in a shop, library, another’s home) can be a nudge not only to read something new, but also to go back to a familiar text with a refreshed eye, or even a new context. The ideal bookshelf In a new book, Bibliophile, Jane Mount, a New York-based artist, illustrates this last point most vividly. Mount has accumulated a considerable following with what she calls the Ideal Bookshelf. Over the past decade, she has been painting, often on commission, bookshelves populated with people’s favourite books — “which books they’d pick to represent themselves, which books they love the most”. She writes: “Painted together on a shelf, these books tell a story of what we’ve experienced, what we believe, who we are.” She reckons that since 2008 she has painted more than 1,000 shelves (“that’s 15,000 or so book spines, many of them painted multiple times”). In Bibliophile , she shares drawings of the books she has painted most often (at the top of the list: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee) — and then zones off into multiple lists that prompt, in an increasingly serendipitous manner, the reader into taking stock of the diverse ways in which books are organised and shared.
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/get-some-spines/article25018358.ece
