Marshall McLuhan’s Strange Reading Habit: “I Read Only the Right-Hand Page of Serious Books”

No doubt about it, Marshall McLuhan was a cryptic thinker and a bit of an odd duck. Earlier this week, Colin Marshall brought you an Introduction to Marshall McLuhan, presented by Tom Wolfe (best known for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and ‎The Bonfire of the Vanities). In putting together that post, we stumbled upon another gem of a video, a testament to McLuhan’s quirkiness — and we mean that in the best possible way. Above McLuhan, kicking back on a couch, reveals his “peculiar reading habit,” admitting: “If it’s a frivolous, relaxing book, I read every word. But serious books I read on the right-hand side only because I’ve discovered enormous redundancy in any well-written book, and I find that by reading only the right-hand page this keeps me very wide awake, filling in the other page out of my own noodle.” There’s a bit of hubris in that approach, but also a certain amount of creativity too. Perhaps you’ll want to give it a try.

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Related Content:

The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe

Has Technology Changed Us?: BBC Animations Answer the Question with the Help of Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village


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