It's been a long time since I've bought a book. ABE books which is a database for independent booksellers--mostly used books--keeps sending me emails reminding me that I haven't bought a book recently. I save books, which means that most of the books I read are old books.

There is an interesting article at ars technica Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus, forgotten ideas. Citing a paper in the current edition of Science looking into what the availability of Journal articles online is doing to research, the article states:

Its author's statistical analysis suggests that the ready availability of scientific information has a counterintuitive result: a smaller pool of articles are referenced in the scientific literature.

Here's a bit more in the conclusion:

The results of the explosion of easily available articles, according to Evans, is that "researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles." As a side effect of this, a scientific consensus will typically form more rapidly. The other side of this is that papers containing ideas that don't catch quickly will be forgotten by the scientific world much faster.

Hum, TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood; what are we leaving behind? Maybe there's something in them there old books worth remembering.

I can't write but to get lost in the weeds. But I remembered a blog post where I listed five important books to me when I was in college in the mid-1970's. Here's that list from that post minus the hyperlinks:

Values and Teaching by Louis E. Raths. This 1965 book is still available but isn't in print. The seven criteria of a value helped me to understand a process for valuing.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson.

Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

The Oregon Experiment by Christopher Alexander, et al. I eagerly read other books by Alexander, but this was my first and it had a big impact on my thinking about how democracy could function and why democracy so often falls short as a result of structural assumptions.

The Whole Earth Epilog. I didn't find out about Bateson from the Whole Earth Epilog, nor really about Christopher Alexander but the Epilog helped me to make connections with other fields of study and cultural trends.

I am not really recommending these books to you. However I have thought to recommend Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Also what got to this thread was seeing that a blog called One Sustainable Block, which is about just that, greening a neighborhood, was referencing Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. I messed up and didn't send you any of his books when your brother visited. I do think that some one of Alexander's books might be worthwhile. A Pattern Language is a very good book.

My recommendation is to think of a book or some books that were once important to you but you haven't read in a while. Get one of those books to read. There are some ideas worth remembering even if they haven't caught on yet.