The Internet and the Inner-Net

I might as well begin with some thoughts on what I hope this blog will be about. It is primarily about the paradox of my wanting to use the internet to document my reflections on the books I read for pleasure. Lately, most of these are nineteenth-century classics, and I have intentionally focussed on them because I find that they are a powerful antidote to online consciousness or the mental practices of the internet. Online consciousness is fleeting, superficial, tenuous, accelerated and networked. Reading big novels demands a different kind of mindset, one characterized by sustained attention, depth of thought and solitude. In particular, when I read nineteenth-century novels, I am enveloped in an age that predates computers and other familiar twentieth-century technologies. I like to call the old books the "Inner-Net" because they lead you into yourself in ways that online consciousness will not allow. It fosters generative solitude, mending thoughts...

I began by reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky in November of 2007, quickly followed by Madame Bovary by Flaubert and The Three Musketeers by Dumas. In January of 2008 I read Tolstoy's War and Peace and Chopin's The Awakening. I am now rereading Great Expectations by Dickens and gearing up, on March 1st, to read Don Quixote for the first time since I read it in college. In the days to come I hope to catch up a little and post a few items pertaining to these books, just so that I can gather my thoughts and give them a little bit of shape before moving on. Writing is the best kind of thinking, after all.

I recognize that it is indeed a paradox to use today's "Internet" to help me transcribe my journeys in the "Inner-Net" of paper books.