i don't read. okay -- that's an exaggeration. but i'm pretty sure i read far less than most people i know; really the only things i read are the occasional fiction binge, the onion, and sports sites. it's not because i like sports, not really; it's because there are often funny things there, and basically the only reason why i read stuff by people i don't know is humor. i read a couple of friends' weblogs. i think that's it. i haven't read a newspaper or a magazine in quite some time.
with half an eye towards remedying it, i went with cindy to a gigantic book sale last weekend, affiliated with the san francisco public library. i got a bag of books -- not large enough, but a reasonable medley of serious and not-so-serious. four days later, i've basically read all of the non-serious stuff and none of the serious stuff.
i read a lot when i was a kid, but around when i went to college i more or less stopped, with the exception of the author binges; when i read something i like, i go out and find all of that author's work and read it, because i have some evidence that i 'll like it. i do the same thing with music, come to think of it. outside of that, i have no idea what i'll actually like, so i end up not reading so much.
i'm going to advance an unpopular theory here, and say that this isn't all bad. one of the side effects of not reading is that i've explored a lot of idea-space on my own, without preconceptions or any particular guidance. this fits into a philosophy i've had for some time now, which is that you only get to see something for the first time once, and that you should cherish those moments. you only get to learn how to do something once; the rubik's cube is a good example here. for a lot of things, it's not the end knowledge that's exciting so much as the process of discovery. the more i read, the less there is to discover on my own.
obviously this isn't an absolute argument. reading is itself a process of discovery, and without stimuli i probably wouldn't think about a whole lot of things. in practice, the reason i don't read so much is because i'm lazy, or more to the point because i have no idea what i should be reading. but there is a flip side to the coin; i think part of the reason i come up with so many nonstandard ideas (or have, in the past; i've hit another midlife crisis about running out of ideas, which is my first in quite some time (maybe three months) but around the 20th since i graduated from college) is that i don't have this framework that would come from absorbing conventional wisdom.
obviously there's also a lot of arrogance floating around here, about not wanting to be told what to think. but the way i see it, my friends are a lot more intelligent than most things i could read, and i'm a lot more curious about what they have to say than about what conventional wisdom has to say. after all, conventional wisdom exists precisely because it's easy to figure out. i don't want to ruin the newness of thinking about something for the first time in a situation where i have no one to talk to.