📘 Part 3: Books

This episode's vocabulary

Intangible  (adj.) - impossible to touch, to describe exactly, or to give an exact value:

She has that intangible quality which you might call charisma.

Engrossing  (adj.) - very interesting and needing all your attention: an engrossing book/story

Antiquated  (adj.) - old-fashioned or unsuitable for modern society:

antiquated ideas/attitudes/values; antiquated laws/machinery/technology

Alien (adj.) - coming from a different country, race, or group: an alien culture

Put you off (phrasal verb) - to make someone dislike something or someone, or to discourage someone from doing something: The smell of hospitals always puts me off.

Paperbacks  (noun)- a book with a cover made of thick paper: a best-selling paperback

Go for (phrasal verb) - to choose something: Instead of butter, I always go for margarine or a low-fat spread.

Classics(noun)- classic books; the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture, esp. their languages and literature

Outliers  (noun)- a person, thing, or fact that is very different from other people, things, or facts, so that it cannot be used to draw general conclusions:

People who live past 100 are genetic outliers, whose longevity is unreachable for most of us.

Contain  (verb) - to have something inside or include something as a part.

Shave smth off (phrasal verb) - to reduce something by the stated amount:

The new high speed trains will shave 25 minutes off the journey time. Our prices have been shaved by five percent!

Conceive of (verb) - to imagine something: I think my uncle still conceives of me as a four-year-old. He couldn't conceive of a time when he would have no job.

Autobiographies  (noun)- a book about a person's life, written by that person.

A recipe for success/disaster/trouble - (collocation) – to be very likely to become a disaster,

success; All those children unsupervised sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.

Wages  (noun)- the money earned by an employee, esp. when paid for the hours worked.

Dispense with (verb) - to get rid of or stop using something or someone that you do not need: They've had to dispense with a lot of luxuries since Mike lost his job.

Quasi (prefix) /kweɪ.zaɪ-/- used to show that something is almost, but not completely, the thing described: the school uniform is quasi-military in style.

Crucial  (adj.) - extremely important or necessary: a crucial decision/question.

Aberrant  (adj.) - different from what is typical or usual, especially in an unacceptable way.

Appeal to smb (verb) - to interest or attract someone: It's a programme designed to appeal mainly to 16 to 25-year-olds. I think what appeals to me about his painting is his use of colour.

Utility  (noun)- the usefulness of something, especially in a practical way.

Phase smth out (phrasal verb) - to remove or stop using something gradually or in stages.

Obsolete  (adj.) - not in use any more, having been replaced by something newer and better or more fashionable: Gas lamps became obsolete when electric lighting was invented.

A listicle (noun)- a newspaper, magazine, or online article that is in the form of a list:

I hate those listicles called things like "10 Things You Didn't Know About Cats".

Shrink -shrank -shrunk (verb) - to become smaller, or to make something smaller:

Your sweater will shrink if you wash it at too high a temperature. The company's profits have shrunk from $5.5 million to $1.25 million.

Dense (adj.) - having parts that are close together so that it is difficult to go or see through: dense fog; a dense forest

A medium (noun) - a method or way of expressing something: the broadcasting/print medium

Digest a single book  (collocation) – to read or hear new information and take the necessary time to understand it: this chapter is so difficult to digest, I'll have to read it again later.

Whereas (conjunction) - compared with the fact that; but.

Questions and Answers

Maria: What's the difference between paper books and e-books?

Rory: I suppose for some people the difference is night and day. If you're used to paper books, then you might prefer reading them to e-books despite the convenience they offer. There's something, at least in my opinion, there's something intangible about how reading a real book feels compared to how reading an e-book feels that makes it a bit more engrossing to read a real book. Then again, if you if you've grown up with technology, maybe reading a regular book might feel a bit antiquated and alien to you and might put you off reading.

Maria: What's the difference between reading habits of young people and old people?

Rory: Probably that older people read more paperbacks and young people read more e-books, first of all. Secondly, older people read longer texts and young people generally don't. You can see this in the character limits on things like Instagram and Twitter, for example. So the sources might differ too, now that I think about it. Young people generally tend to read material created by other young people, whereas older people go for classics more regularly. I'm generalizing here, of course, there will naturally be some outliers who do the opposite.

Maria: Some people say that it's easier for children who start reading at a young age to succeed. Do you agree?

Rory: I couldn't agree more. I think the greatest gift my parents ever gave me was teaching me how to read at young age and then encouraging that further. There are so many ideas contained even within the first few pages of some books that can save you time and money and shave years off learning something just by experience alone. People rarely conceive of it in this way, but many books, especially autobiographies, contain decades and centuries of life experience that we can learn from without having to go through it or relive it ourselves. And that is definitely a recipe for success.

Maria: Do you think libraries are important nowadays?

Rory: Probably in places with lower wages and less access to education material, like books, than in the general public. Where I'm from, most people can afford books so they can dispense with the library quite easily, though I think for some reason this quasi-romantic idea of the community library as a center of the community persists. But while that might have been true decades ago, it's less so now for the reasons that I already mentioned. There are other places that serve this purpose. And as we go ever more online, I'm not sure that they have much relevance in most parts of the modern world. But for people who lack access, then it's definitely a crucial resource that we should cultivate. Particularly if we want people to be successful.

Maria: What books do children like to read?

Rory: I don't know if you can put a limit on what books children like to read. For example, I used to read histories of the World Wars when I was younger, though that might have been a bit aberrant for someone in my age group at the time. Probably, generally speaking, to, like, something that appeals to their imaginations and fantasies about the world and what's in their heads. What that means is that the market for books similar to something like Harry Potter is huge. Adults often read something that has some explicit utility, whereas for children it's more about what's interesting.

Maria: Do you think paper books will disappear in the future?

Rory: No... I doubt it. There are billions of books in the world, so it would be hard to phase all of them out, really, wouldn't it? They can be a fashion statement too, can't they? People think they look cleverer with a full bookcase behind them. And perhaps a more charitable observation might be that when we look at other kinds of obsolete media, then we can see that this doesn't happen. Like, radio didn't disappear as TV, TV hasn't disappeared with online streaming. So books might take a back seat, but they're not going anywhere.

Maria: Do people read more nowadays?

Rory: I think so, although the quality of what they read might have been reduced, somewhat, since anyone can write anything these days... Even I did! And if I can do it, then you know that anyone is capable of doing it. Joking aside, though, it seems like people read more complete texts, but the text themselves are shorter. So things like articles, listicles, blog posts, so possibly the attention span required for reading has shrunk. I wonder if that's necessarily a bad thing, though, since, you know, these things that I mentioned could be more information dense than previous forms of written media.

Maria: How will e-books affect paper books?

Rory: Well, I suppose as e-books growing popularity, then the market share of paper books will be eaten into at least somewhat as they replace them in some homes. Probably what is more likely in the immediate future, generally speaking, is that the market for reading will expand since different groups will prefer different mediums. Longer term they'll probably balance according to the market demand.

Maria: What's the difference between films and books?

Rory: Books are usually a longer term investment in terms of time and... well, imagination, I suppose. Your average film is around 90 minutes to 2 hours long, but it can take days to read and digest a single book. And like I say, books rely more on your imagination, whereas films are a sort of shared vision of how something should look. Not everybody agrees with that vision, but OK. The story structure tends to be similar... at least I would imagine, as does the level of interest. So in some ways there's not a big difference. And in other ways there's a huge difference.