Read Books

I recently read one of those quotation compilation books, this one titled Who Said That? Composed by George Sweeting with an emphasis on Christian topics, this version was full of interesting theological and devotional quotes I hadn’t seen before.

However, I ran into a number of apocryphal attributions I knew were fake. Sweeting didn’t sweat the fact-checking. For example, he gave this quote, attributed to Mark Twain: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

There is no known document Mark Twain wrote that contains that sentence. Yet, how true a sentence it is.

It’s becoming uniquely true in the dawning age of artificial intelligence. Teachers used to worry we’d just read the Cliff Notes on a classic book. Now, kids just consult their chatbot, asking what Huckleberry Finn was all about.

Last week, I acknowledged the promise of these new computational tools, but you still have to think for yourself. That means you still have to read books, many of them cover to cover. Otherwise, you’ll just be sucked into the same groupthink our species is so prone to.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.