I remember a teacher, whose name is not important, and who never taught me specifically but was, nevertheless, around, whom I remember primarily for the use, more than once so it really stuck in my mind, of a peculiar and amusing phrase - "I'll put that in my brain". It was something he'd say as he was walking away, hurriedly, I can only assume to teach some kids something else from his brain, and that's the right context in which to use a phrase like this. It stuck with me. Rarely do we deliberately put things in our brains. Perhaps we should. If only we could. If only we had the time.
This week, Sarah Vine, probably dreadful columnist and wife of definitely dreadful Tory cabinet minister, Michael Gove, felt the ire of twitter as a "shelfie" revealed her or perhaps her husband's ownership of some unambiguously dreadful books; among them,
The Bell Curve,
Atlas Shrugged, and some holocaust-denying nonsense by dreadful historian David Irving (and yeah, I'm not going to hyperlink that to anything). Many twitterers found this unacceptable,
stretching the dubious link between owning a copy of book (and perhaps even, having actually
read it) and endorsing its contents
beyond parody almost immediately, a phenomenon
pounced upon with glee by
the usual reactionary types, the whole fiasco splitting predictably along the usual lines of the "woke" "reactionary" / "leftist" vs the "pro-free speech" / "classical liberal" / "right". The original tweet, has, of course,
been (pointlessly) deleted, but not in time to prevent the viral spread of
#bookgate and
#TweetYourMostProblematicBookshelf across the next cycle of trending topics.
I have no interest in taking "sides" in this "debate", but suffice it to say that race is meaningless (while intelligence is not) - the holocaust really did happen, and
Atlas Shrugged is a great big steaming pile of dog turd. (I know the latter to be true because once I almost read it). Anyway, the brief distraction of a social media shitstorm got me thinking more than I have for a while about
books.
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| Judge me! |
Meanwhile, I'm taking the time to manage my disparate notes, references, and sundry other digital scraps into a database using the mighty
Airtable, and deriving enormous pleasure from doing so. I think it's one of the things I enjoy most in life - making
connections - and Airtable is the perfect platform for gathering information in a connected way, loose or as tightly as you like. It's a relational database program that requires no knowledge of programming or capitulation to user-unfriendly software (bye bye, Access) to set up. Professionally, it's been a career-changer, but never mind about that now.
I have three tables, "Books", "People" and "Categories". The first is a list of books, obviously; the second, almost as obviously, of people (these only sometimes being authors of other books, and sometimes just people referred to in the books) and the third - "categories" - i.e. topics, references, tags attached to things that aren't people: institutions, historical dates, phenomena, ideologies, and so on. Further categorisation may be required, but this is the basic structure.
"Books" is linked to "People" in that every book has (at least) one author. "People" links back to "Books" in that a person may be the author of a book, or referred to in a book. So the "People" table contains links to records of books those people have written, or books they are referred to in, or both, i.e.
"Books", in turn, is also linked to "Categories" as well as to itself, because a book may refer to other books. A very simple structure for maximum cross referencing, opening up more rabbit holes than it would take a lifetime to fall down. From here I only hope to build larger and less predictable structures, connecting things to other things and allowing me to put as many possible of said things
in my brain.
Now I don't know about you but I think I'm quite happy with the idea of ebooks eventually replacing paper books entirely, though of course for aesthetic reasons this will probably never happen. But if it does, I'm ready for that. I
originally intended to pair down my book collection to nothing physical at all, transitioning entirely over to digitised books, but there are some it's hard to let go off. Some books have to be read in the lap as well in the hand. But perhaps this is useless sentimentality.
When you read ebooks through Google Play, any highlights and notes you add while you read are saved to a Google Docs file. All Google Docs files have a unique URL, which I can then link to in the database. Again, contrariwise, if a book is an ebook, I can link to its URL in the database - and so the database becomes a common reference point for paper and digital books alike. (In some cases, as I've sold or not sold books on when finding a digital version, I have copies in more than one format, which is fine, lovely and to be expected).
For paper books, whose pages I sometimes capture as images to scribble on or annotate digitally through Evernote (also recommended, and sometimes marketed as
a second brain, likewise, a note page comes with a unique URL that can also be linked back to the database. So digital notes on paper books are stored together, never to be lost or rendered un-findable again.
I've shown you
my plant database before but this one's not quite ready for sharing yet. If you'd like to have sneak peak though, let me know. Rabbit holes for all!
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