A Vacuum Cleaner Attachment for your Brain
About 15 years ago we hosted Steven K. Roberts when he passed through Chicago with his Behemoth, a computer and communications-laden recumbent bicycle. Steven is a life-long high-tech nomad, though on this trip he was soft pedaling Behemoth—transporting it cross country via truck, that is.
An image invoked by Steven during dinner at the Akai Hana restaurant in Wilmette, Illinois has stuck with me all of these years. We were talking about the bottlenecks to acquiring knowledge. Steven said “I wish there was a vacuum cleaner attachment for my brain so I can just suck in the information.”
And that brings me to the topic of this post: my reading philosophy. I don’t mean reading philosophers (though I’ve done my share of that), I mean my philosophy about reading. We already have a vacuum cleaner attachment for our brains—two of them, in fact—but it takes some thought and practice to get the most out of them.
Here are some of the things I’ve learned as a life-long, voracio