Careful! Books can make you boring, sanctimonious, malleable and politically incorrect, according to the New York Times. Sheesh. What evils must lurk in newspapers, then, too?

There's a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book lovers....To be a reader these days is to be a sterling member of society, a thoughtful and sensitive human being, a winner.

Without the consensus of large parts of the public on this point, a film like Mark Moskowitz's diminutive documentary, ''Stone Reader,'' could never have provoked the hosannas it has, much less made it into the aisles of Blockbuster.

...The fact is Moskowitz has nothing whatever to say about the books he fondles in shot after lingering shot. It's not about the contents of the books. It's about their fetishization.

Good point. But then, while appropriately warning against substituting the judgement of books for your own observations, writer Cristinia Nehring just has to slip in some Bush bashing.

Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them -- or at least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues. Books are not the pure good that the festival crowds are sometimes told: you can learn anything from a book -- or nothing. You can learn to be a suicide bomber, a religious fanatic or, indeed, a Bush supporter as easily as you can learn to be tolerant, peace-loving and wise.

Or, indeed, yet another fatuous liberal essayist in the New York Times. I wonder if books did it to her.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 3, 2004 11:38 AM

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