Bunches of Books

I love to read.

LOVE

LOVE

LOVE

So perhaps you can see why this particular art piece that I discovered in the BYU Museum of Art captured my interest.

 This is made entirely of books. Entirely. That's a lot of books.

This is the backside.

And it's so tall! So many books!

Obviously, art pieces have layers of meaning to them... so I was thinking about this particular sculpture. At first, I came up with all of these ideas of the strength and power of literature.

Upon thinking further, I realized that this giant tower of books looked a lot like a garbage block - you know, like the ones you see in Monsters Inc. when Sulley is afraid that Boo got chopped up in the machine. This, combined with the fact that all of the books in this sculpture were old and used, is making a huge statement about the worlds' relationship with books today.

I'm not saying that books are trash and that nobody reads anymore. I just think that our society is moving away from printed words. We read social media all the time. Colleges and even high schools are starting to use online materials for classes. More and more people are using e-books, buying Kindles... people don't even bring actual scriptures to church anymore because they have the scriptures on their phones... and so less people buy printed books. Books are an old idea, ready to be turned into a forgettable trash-lump. How long will it be before the majority of people read via electronic media?

I personally love having an actual book in my hands when I read. A book with pages to turn. A book that I can put on my shelf, that I can see visually alongside the rest of my library. I strongly dislike having to read things online or on a Kindle. Maybe it's just because I'm not accustomed to using these instead of books. But in any case, it just saddens me that books are sort of "dying out". Sad indeed.