You tell yourself that you want to be more cultured, that you want to have something to talk about with people other than what you ate for dinner last night. You’re fed up of laughing your way through the cartoon section of the newspaper, laughing because you didn’t really get the joke but felt obliged too anyway because the nosey person next to you was looking over your shoulder. You like stuff to be spelled out for you, so you decide that reading a book would be the perfect solution.
You ask friends and colleagues for book recommendations. You nod emphatically to their suggestions, taking care to remember at least one of the titles they suggest; only that joke you read this morning from the cartoon section suddenly makes sense and you laugh, completely forgetting what your colleague just said. But that’s ok; you remember the gist of it, right?