Greg Proffit Writing

Category: Books

“Books” categorize posts and related information dealing with, related to, reviewing, quoting, or excerpting books and other long-form print media. Posts referencing specific titles and authors will likely appear here. Reading lists will likely appear here.

  • Just Because You’ve Read About It Doesn’t Mean You Know About It

    Just Because You’ve Read About It Doesn’t Mean You Know About It

    you've read about it
    Photo by Kelcy Gatson on Unsplash

    # 24 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Reading about something is not the same as doing something. Reading a story about Paris is not the same as actually visiting Paris. This applies to every aspect of reading. As valuable as it is, it is no substitute for experience.

    The intended audience for this tip is the ardent, imaginative reader. Your mind can trick you into believing you’ve done and experienced something because you’ve read about it. You may convince yourself you’ve learned all there is to know because you’ve read about it. I don’t mean to imply your reading will cause a psychotic break with reality. But the emotional and intellectual engagement stirred by reading good writing creates a world. A real one. And sometimes it’s difficult for the most intelligent to realize that all the things they’ve read about, and therefore felt as if they were present seeing, hearing, feeling, fighting, loving, longing in the scenes and characters is real only in their mind. Perhaps this has happened to you.

    I am not being disparaging. Real in the mind is real. There is nothing more “real”. But no one is a trout fisherman because they read a story about trout fishing outside Pamplona. Even if you recall details like the crisp newspapers to wrap the day’s catch in. And regardless whether you can almost taste the dust from the bus ride back to town. Dust you’ll quench with Sangria in the bar in time for the day’s bull running. No, dear reader, reading about drinking red wine won’t stain your teeth or make you drunk. Even when Hemingway is writing the tale.

    I always think of two things in relation to this tip:

    The first is the scene in Good Will Hunting in which Robin Williams’ psychiatrist character chastises Matt Damon’s ne’er do well savant character. Damon’s Will Hunting receives a dressing down for being so smug. He’s never actually done the things he’s read about. He’s never been out of Boston. Although he could recite all kinds of facts about Michelangelo, gleaned from the books he’s read, he doesn’t know what it smells like inside the Sistine Chapel. Because he’s never been. “You’re Just A Kid”. Williams’ character tells him. He’s never really been in love. He’s merely read about a lot of things. Though he can provide brilliant analysis with his near perfect recall, reading is no substitute for the actual streets of Rome. It’s a fantastic scene.

    The second is on a cross-country car trip when I was 20. I had picked up a Frenchman named Dominic hitchhiking from Binghamton, NY, on his way to see a girl in Sterling, CO. After a side-trip to New York City we started west. On the second day, Dominic grew critical of the countryside in his fatigue at seeing the farms and cornfields along the interstate. 

    As night fell on a long day of driving, my passenger got impatient. He pleaded with me to get out of the cornfields. After seemingly endless miles of nothing but corn, we saw an exit towards a town. Maybe it would be a more suburban, less pastoral view. I could drive forever at that age, but the corn was like a green ocean. I was suffering sensory deprivation. Plus, we were forced to limit our expenditures to fuel and food. We would not waste precious money on a hotel for the few hours of sleep we’d need before heading out again. I either needed to drive on to a rest stop, or find a suitable place.

    This is the West

    We came off the interstate and I turned off the service road onto a long, wide 2-lane in western Ohio. Mailboxes dispersed on either side marked the corners of front yards as big as baseball fields. Dark, wood-framed farmhouses sat well back from the road. Only occasionally did we see a light in a window. Still, Dom suggested I pull off into one of the front yards where we could sleep. He insisted we could set up my tent beside my Toyota, or sleep under the stars in our sleeping bags. 

    “What? Right in their front yard?” I said, “Have you lost your mind?”

    “Oh, not at all,” he replied in good but broken English, “This is the West, I have read all about it.”

    “Oh,” says I, “you’ve read about it. Good. Then you’ve no doubt read about shotguns, too.”

    I kept right on driving, headed back nearer the interstate, away from Dom’s temptation to get us shot at or dog bit, and eventually found a dirt farm road leading back into a cornfield where we would be safe and could get a few hours shut eye.

    “I have read about it.” I’ll never forget that. Don’t you forget it either.

  • Read for Sheer Joy—The Ultimate Call To Action

    Read for Sheer Joy—The Ultimate Call To Action

    read for sheer joy
    Photo by Kate Hliznitsova on Unsplash

    # 17 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Read for the sheer joy of it. If you cannot read due to time constraints, look for time leaks to plug so you can make time to read. If you still cannot get the time to sit with a book or good magazine, listen to audiobooks at every available moment: when walking, when commuting, or on a drive of any distance.

    I count reading as the cornerstone of all my acquired skills. It is the skill that informs and makes possible all the others I possess other than those that I’ve picked up by observation and practice. (I learned to drive nails with a hammer by hitting my thumb a lot—reading would have been less painful, but not as good a teacher).

    Reading Is What Makes Writers Immortal

    The whole concept of reading amazes me. Graphical communication supposes the creation of information in the present to be recorded for impartation and consumption in the future without a loss of meaning. Whether a book, an article, an essay, or a note, written words bring the author’s mind to the reader, whether or not the author is still physically alive. 

    For those who wonder about cryonics to achieve immortality, I say, try writing. Via reading, the author’s mind is as alive and fresh and real as the day he chiseled, or penned, or typed the words.

    So much of spoken language is thankfully ephemeral. It passes on the same wind that carries its vibrations to the ear of the hearer. And sometimes it goes in one ear and out the other just as rapidly. 

    As a test, list how many speeches you know about as compared to how many book titles you’ve read. Any famous speeches that predate radio and television have survived and made it to us because we can read them. How sad if we only had oral history to learn from and to pass on to our progeny.

    Written language is an archive of saved thoughts. Expecting the existence of a reader, the writer writes. She supposes that what she records will be relevant and helpful to some reader who comes along in five minutes, or five years, or five millennia.

    Reading Is A Kind Of Magic

    With these ideas in mind, reading anything is a joy to me. It is a kind of magic. I feel sorry for those who only read of necessity. One of the mind-blowing experiences missed by those who find no pleasure in reading is the opportunity to try on a new life, or a new world in your imagination, to time travel, either by re-living the past or rocketing into the sci-fi future.


    If you read the words pink elephant, you cannot help but see it. How did I put it in your mind? I wrote it and you read it. Amazing. If you think that was cool, try to escape the knowledge of that happening with every word you ever read. A writer somewhere cooks up a thought, pecks it out in abstract shapes, squiggles, and lines, posts it somewhere and the reader’s internal interpreter assigns meaning to all the gibberish and makes it real in the reader’s mind. 

    And while there is something precious and sensual about holding a book in your hands, of feeling the paper as you turn the pages, digital formats and audiobooks are a fantastic way to get many of the same benefits, and they’re convenient in a pinch. Go ahead, read for sheer joy.

  • Books

    Books are the next best thing to Experience, and often enhance it with Perspective and Understanding

    I’m putting together a book list. Titles I’ve read that I can recommend to my kids or to anyone. I got the idea after listening to a Tim Ferris podcast interviewing Jordan Peterson during which he mentions Peterson’s list on his website. It is a fantastic list of 100 books.

    I copied the list into Evernote, reformatted it to add a checkbox, and went through to see how many I’ve read. So far, I’ve read twenty-eight of Peterson’s recommended books. His is weighted heavily to volumes by Freud and Jung. Understandably, since he spent years as a clinical psychologist. I’ve never read entire books by either psychoanalyst, but I’m familiar with their work and ideas. I will read their books. I’ll read the remaining seventy-two on the list over the next several years, God willing. Peterson said, there’s a whole education in there. So true.

    A couple of his titles are by Dostoevsky and Hemingway. Two of my favorites, though they couldn’t be more different stylistically. Their works are on my list, too. With an extra two Hemingway’s that Peterson didn’t include on his.

    In looking at my incomplete list, standing now at some 40 titles that off the top of my head I deem to have had the most impact on my life, I’m struck by how many are works of fiction. There are two non-fiction works that have wrought change in my systems of thinking and emotional awareness, but the bulk of the really life-altering books I’ve read are works of fiction.

    Great writers can capture truth and the essence of life or some aspect of existence so wonderfully, that it grafts into the reader. Some character, or some scene can make you see the world in an entirely new, more complete way. And that’s good.

    I have a heartache already that I will not be able to read all of the truly great books I wish to read, but I’m gonna go for it for sure. What’s on your own list?

  • Prelude to a Review of The Overstory…(is that a thing???)

    Ancient Groves Nature Trail though old growth forest in the Sol Duc section of Olympic National Park in Washington, United States – This is what Foresters refer to as “The Understory”

    I love to read. It is the single greatest skill a human can acquire in my opinion. The books I’ve read have transformed my life, and continue to do so. There is something magic about the transposition of knowledge, sensation, emotion, and longing that happens when a skillful author communicates via a form of ancient, abstract telepathy to the reader.

    Some books are better than others. Some tackle subject matter more weighty than others. Some achieve both. The one I’m reading now is on that list.

    I’m only one-third of the way through it and it’s already blown my mind. It actually blew my mind in the first couple of pages by a cosmic connection I’d felt relating to something I’d jotted in my notes as I stared out my picture window at the pairs of willow oaks budding up the perpendicular street centered in my view.

    I wrote this snippet: 

    ”Has anyone ever successfully captured the perfect architecture inherent in the design of a tree?”

    I was thinking of the perfect marvel of engineered branching and load bearing and surface area distribution and how no human architect has ever attempted building anything like a tree.

    Imagine my profound surprise and delight to begin listening to the audible version of The Overstory, by Richard Powers. winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an incredible story about trees, and how they have impacted and enriched and enthralled and empowered the characters lives. Some of them also received tree messages, so…kinda makes ya think.

     Some of these magnificent spires have been here since the birth of Jesus. Imagine. A thing so ubiquitous as to have become almost invisible. And yet, a thing that we share 25% of our own DNA with, and owe 100% of our lives to. And things without which, there is no anything. No, really.

    I’m becoming more and more convinced that humans, though apparently created last, and ostensibly for the purpose of taking care of our orb-shaped space ride on the outer edge of the Milky Way, may in fact have devolved into one of the least intelligent life forms still alive and kicking on our cosmic home.

    Trees appear to be smarter. They certainly live longer, cooperate better, are more social, and are more committed to sharing their resources to insure their thriving survival together. Maybe we have a still have a slim chance to change that and we can learn enough to move out of the stupidity basement.

    I’ll write more about this amazing book, I’m sure, but I want to heartily recommend it. You will thank me, and trees, if you do choose to read it.