Tell me a story (day 14)

I read remarkably little fiction.  Most of my time is spent reading someone's treatise on media theory, or technology history,  gaming, narrative, etc.  I read other people's opinions.  Rarely but notably I hit upon a well written book in that genre that inspires me and genuinely changes my way of thinking about something.  The previously mentioned "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong is an example,  "Deep Time of the Media" by Siegfried Zielinski is another.  There is something about the way these authors write that has at least some resemblance to narrative.  In "Deep Time of the Media", the approach is a sort of trip through time and space where we are told of technologies that maybe didn't make it but were important to the development of other technologies, and certainly important to the culture of the time.  There is a also an attention to the characters (and they mostly were characters) that invented and peddled technology -- the geeks of their time.  I love the fact that the author makes no apologies for taking a romantic stroll through history.   He says that he chose the anecdotes and technologies in the book by looking for the 'shiny things', the bits that were just too curious to pass up.  He calls this a kind of archeology, taking issue with the idea that the evolution of technology (like any evolution) is linear and always yielding the best solution.  Indeed, the word 'best' implies defined criteria that could lead to optimal solutions to...well..I don't know exactly.   The point is that luck plays a giant role in any new technology gaining popularity and that there are some sad failures that were very exciting at the time.

This may be sacrilegious but I no longer make time for books like Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" or Deleuze and Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus".  I own these books but I don't love them.  Maybe it's an underlying pining for more fiction, but I genuinely wonder why the topics of these books couldn't have been written with a little more of the pleasure of discovery built in.   I know some people love "Thousand Plateaus" and I may be tragically missing out but everyone draws boundaries on their time and I've drawn mine at their door.  Brian Massumi is an author that comes closer to making that kind of material more human, and certainly his book "Parables for the Virtual" is an interesting read where he allows himself a more fanciful jaunt through the material.

A lot of the books I read were recommended by Amazon.  In some ways they have my tastes figured out.  But it would be nice if the recommendation engine could notice that I don't read fiction, and suggest fiction based on the kinds of non-fiction that I read.  Surely there are some books that would bridge the two worlds.  I feel like I might be missing a whole treasure trove of material...