I love reading Haruki Murakami. Especially his shorts. But the other day when running up to the library book drop to return a stack of books (totally late/overdue), I noticed a quotation posted in their little display of announcements and such:
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
And I BALKED at it. My insides BALKED.
Because even when I read the books other people read, I always seem to think different thoughts about those books than other people. Maybe it's a bitch thing. Maybe I'm stupid. I don't know. But I frequently find myself not thinking the same thoughts in response to the same books.
Okay, I get it. That's not really the point of what he's saying. Which I probably do agree with. Like the most-read books of all time are The Bible, Chairman Mao's quotations, and Harry fucking Potter (which I read specifically because so many other people did, and it felt/feels important and useful to be able to talk about pop culture phenoms and be able to share something millions of people are familiar with; that's how I feel about religious texts too, and wisdom-filled propaganda that shapes generations of people's lives).
I guess I should be inspired by the point of Murakami's words, which I *think* is that you want to read a lot of shit that most of the average people aren't reading so you can have a bigger library of thoughts than other people and think things that aren't already being thunk and stuff. More doors will be open to you.
Maybe that's why I think different thoughts about the same exact books everybody else is reading, though; because I've read a lot of books that they haven't, and those thoughts inform and expand my brain's experience of, like, The Holy Bible and Harry Potter.
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