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A visit to Walter Mosley & his #books
https://wapo.st/3DM7xzt
in which we learn: he discards most books he's read, except for comics (but disdains prissy collectors), worries that universities are too specialized, loves to read #history from Will & Ariel Durant to Collingwood...
![text:
Being accessible, and a generalist, is clearly something Mosley admires. One set that takes up considerable real estate on his bookshelf is the 11-volume Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant.
“The university has become a great bane on culture,” Mosley said, for both its significant financial cost and its focus on specialization. “If you’re going to be a scholar you can only talk about one thing, like a certain flange on a door in the 15th century. You write a whole book about that. But Durant, he’s a real scholar, he knows history. There’s no way that a university would ever accept that collection [to publish], but it’s so erudite.”
background: complete set of Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, in colorful dust jackets
lying atop them: 2 Marvel comics: Captain America and The Incerdible Hulk](https://media.historians.social/media_attachments/files/114/167/743/340/070/433/original/330a331dd81d18d3.png "text:
Being accessible, and a generalist, is clearly something Mosley admires. One set that takes up considerable real estate on his bookshelf is the 11-volume Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant.
“The university has become a great bane on culture,” Mosley said, for both its significant financial cost and its focus on specialization. “If you’re going to be a scholar you can only talk about one thing, like a certain flange on a door in the 15th century. You write a whole book about that. But Durant, he’s a real scholar, he knows history. There’s no way that a university would ever accept that collection [to publish], but it’s so erudite.”
background: complete set of Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, in colorful dust jackets
lying atop them: 2 Marvel comics: Captain America and The Incerdible Hulk")
@CitizenWald That's wonderful. It also strongly echoes Louis L'Amour, who says similar things about universities versus self-education in his surprisingly good "Education of a Wandering Man" (but who collected books instead of discarding them, especially reference works, in a library with floor to ceiling shelves on every wall that hinged open to reveal additional floor-to-ceiling shelves behind them).
@msbellows Among other things, I always find it fascinating to be able to share the voracious reading habits of figures from popular culture--from these novelists to Johnny Cash, David Bowie, and Tina Turner.
Reading is cool. People need to know that